Carl Semmelroth, PhD

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AcknowledgmentsForty years have passed since the publication of Smith and Smith’sbook Child Management: A Program for Parents and Teachers. Thoseexciting days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with uncountable numbersof discussions with Don Smith about child management, childdevelopment, and the foundations of behavior change continue tobe a reference point for me and greatly influenced this book. My wife, Sara Semmelroth, has been my partner for forty-sixyears, as a mother of our five children, as a partner in our privatecounseling practice, and always as an initiator for trying newthings. Helping others is as instinctual for her as breathing. Aswith previous books, she was the first person to read the originaldraft of each chapter as it was written, and her comments andreactions were my initial signals as to whether I was on track orhad lost my way. Our daughters, Melissa and Jean, also watched over the book asit came into being. Melissa is my self-appointed private cheer-leader. She is always there with encouragement and believes in mewith superhuman tenacity. Jean applies her brilliant, but patient,question asking to each chapter as it is written and provides exam-ples from her own family experience. Jean and Steve’s daughter,our seven-year-old granddaughter, Kathy, is the exemplar of thosechildren who will never submit to another person’s will. Louise Waller, my editor, continues to apply her magical powerto my writings, which, like a philosopher’s stone, transforms theminto books. I continue to receive, entirely undeservedly, the bene-fit of her skills that were honed in a career as psychology editor forseveral large publishing companies. I am grateful. Introduction How to Get the Most Out of This BookThe book is meant for use by individuals, groups, and workshops con-cerned with child management and anger. Because the chapters eachstand on their own, therapists, group leaders, and individual readerscan feel free to study them in the order that meets their needs. Individuals who are studying the book on their own are stronglyencouraged to read chapter 1 first. It contains information aboutanger in general and a way of looking at how anger grows. Most lessons contain exercises that will help you understandand change your behaviors so that your family and children bene-fit. Each exercise starts with real-life examples that guide you andfunction as a model for carrying out the exercise. The more youwork at these exercises, the more apt you will be to make reward-ing changes in your family life. You will come to see anger as thedrag that it is. We strongly suggest that you keep a private notebook or journalwhile working through the book. At the end of most lessons areexamples of how to record successes in making real-life changes.Recording positive changes will be a great help to you in sustain-ing your efforts and making a lasting difference in your life and inthe lives of your children. We all want the very best for our children and we want to beperfect parents for them. Your tendency may be to condemn your-self as a bad parent when you lose it or otherwise fall short of yourideal. Please be gentle and understanding with yourself as you tryto make real changes suggested here. None of us are perfect. Smallsteps in the right direction start us on any long journey. Even twosteps forward and one step back results in progress. Use the mate-rial here as a map that you can consult in finding the directionyou wish to travel, and take the first steps. Getting even partwaythere will result in meaningful differences for you and your family.Bon voyage. Chapter 1 The Anger Chain

Angela’s arm freezes as she starts to hit her four-year-old son. Thelook on his face defuses her rage in mid-detonation. That placebehind her eyes instantly throbs as his expression is imprinted therelike a red-hot brand on the front of her brain. Instantly she knows itwill always be there. Eddie’s eyes, big as saucers, broadcast hisrecognition of a horror he has never before experienced—he feelsunsafe with his mother. Electrifying shame replaces Angela’s exhaustion, produced byher screaming tirade. Eddie moves away from her as she tries to holdhim in a “first-aid” attempt to keep her dreams alive for both of them. The last vestige of her confidence as a parent is replaced by self-hatred and depression. Her dreams of being the mother she wishedher mother had been, of love and being loved, of good timesrecorded in pictures that she would treasure forever, these seem likea terrible joke. Things haven’t gone that way at all. Her irritations with Eddie’s eating and sleeping “problems” as aninfant turned into disgust during his toilet training. She never thought2 The Anger Habit in Parenting

she would resort to shaming and mocking her own child. Her impa- tience with the endless repetition of his two-year-old “no” turned into yelling. Raising her voice at him when he wouldn’t mind her turned into shouting and threatening. And now this. “I’m a horrible mother and a horrible person,” she thinks. “I was so stupid to think I should ever have been a parent. It was just a dream. I hate this and I hate myself. I never realized I’m such an angry, awful person.” Angela is quite capable of being a very good parent and provid- ing a healthy, safe, and disciplined home for her child. The problem isn’t that Angela doesn’t know that she is an “angry, awful person.” She isn’t. The problem is that Angela doesn’t know much about anger. In particular, she doesn’t know what makes her anger grow and what to do about it.

Anger is about control. Many parents are caught up in attempts to

control their children and in doing so, fill their households withangry interactions. As this happens, the parents become more frus-trated and miserable, while the children become more distant andoften out of control. It is helpful to understand how and why anger, once planted inthe family, tends to grow in frequency and intensity. Like an addic-tive drug, more extreme anger is required and it is required moreoften in order to satisfy the anger habit. First, a distinction about anger terms: 1. Others do not see our angry thoughts and feelings, so we will call these internal events preparation for angry behaviors. Among these are feelings of irritation, being offended, being victimized, planning for revenge, thinking of others’ imperfections, and feelings of righteous indignation. The Anger Chain 3

2. Our angry actions and displays can be seen by other people

so they are called angry behaviors. Among these are angry facial expressions, angry words, threatening gestures, hitting, and even killing.

The important point here is that: angry feelings and thoughts (#1) prepare us to carry out angry behaviors (#2).

When a father reacts to his son’s sloppy lawn mowing with a feel-ing of anger, the father’s body is preparing for a physical attack onhis son. The angry feeling is literally his sensing, his physicalawareness, of these internal body preparations. Chemicals havebeen released in his body that are busy speeding up his heart, pro-viding more blood flow to his arms and legs, and increasing hisblood pressure. These physical changes are tuning up the father’sbody for a physical attack on his son. You will find it shocking to think of your feeling of anger insuch raw terms. We are ordinarily unaware that our feeling of angeris our body’s preparation for physically attacking someone. Wehardly ever carry through with a physical attack. Usually ourexhibited angry behaviors warn the other person that we arepreparing to attack them. That warning, taken with some degree ofseriousness, is often enough to get us what we want. Our facialexpressions may be enough to make a child turn down the stereo.If that is not enough, speaking in an angry way may work. And ifthat does not do it, we may shout at the child in a threateningmanner. Regardless of how well we paint over our parenting anger asbeing needed and natural, the possible effectiveness of any ofthese angry behaviors depends on them being experienced bychildren as steps toward physical harm. That is, the effectivenessof angry behaviors depends on children learning to avoid what4 The Anger Habit in Parenting

might follow. Effective parental anger must cause children to

experience fear. Angry feelings and angry behaviors are connected, forming achain that stretches from mild irritation with an accompanyingfacial grimace, to a feeling of rage accompanied by an all-out phys-ical attack. Once parents start using anger to manage their chil-dren, their angry thoughts and behaviors tend to move toward theextreme end of the anger chain. Consider these interactions between parent and child:

• Ten-month-old Celia crawls under a living room table

and pulls out the telephone charging transformer from the wall plug. • Celia’s father, Jack, interrupts his TV watching and gets down on his hands and knees to retrieve Celia and replace the transformer. He picks her up, places her in front of his chair, and puts several toys around her. • Celia promptly crawls toward the table again. Jack barely catches up to her before she gets under the table. He picks her up and says, “You little dickens. You cannot do that. Come over here and play with your blocks.” • When she is released, Celia again heads straight for the table. Jack says, “No, Celia. You can’t do that.” Celia stops and looks at her father. She laughs. He smiles at her. She then proceeds under the table and gets to the transformer before Jack pulls her out. She cries. Her father gets more serious and says, “You can’t do that,” in a loud voice. He takes her back to his chair and sits her by her blocks. • Celia picks up a block, and then drops it and heads at full speed toward the table. Jack yells, “No!” He starts to get up. Celia stops, looks at him, and moves on. Jack rushes over The Anger Chain 5

while shouting, “No.” He grabs her roughly and puts her in

her crib where she cries herself to sleep.

Three years later, when Celia is four, Jack takes her with him shoppingat the grocery store.

• Celia says, “I want to go home.” Her father says, “This will

only take a few minutes and I don’t want to listen to you whine the whole time.” He places her in the grocery cart. • Celia reaches out and pulls at a can on the grocery shelf. In an angry voice Jack says, “Stop that!” • Celia reaches out again when they are in the next aisle and pulls a box of breakfast cereal off the shelf. Jack yells, “You stop that! You wait until we get home and see what you get if you don’t cut it out!” • Celia grabs a package of gum in the checkout line. Her father retrieves it and slaps her.

Jack has regressed along the anger chain from mildly angry inter-ventions with Celia to slapping and hitting her three years later.Any thought or feeling along the right side of the table below car-ries with it the tendency to go further along the anger chain. 6 The Anger Habit in Parenting

The Anger Chain

Some Angry Feelings Lead To… The Anger Chain, Which Leads To… Some Angry Behaviors

bitchy, blamed, attacked,

angry facial expressions bugged, hurried, irritated

superior, contempt, disgust critical comments

misunderstood, provoked, loud voice aloof, arrogant, annoyed

cheated, belligerent shouting

victimized, long-suffering name-calling

boiling, aggressive threatening body posture

burned up, estranged, self-important threats of leaving

despise, furious, righteousness verbal threats of physical harm

incensed, infuriated approaching too closely

righteous strength, powerful hands on body or bumping

righteously controlling, righteously punishing grabbing and shoving

consumed, enraged slapping and hitting

blood lust, hatred (cold), rage (hot) getting weapon for attack

primitive (unsuppressed) anger, murder or suicide

harm at any cost The Anger Chain 7

For example, the feeling of irritation with your children carries

with it the tendency to go beyond angry facial expressions and toengage in critical comments. Likewise, feelings of self-importancecarry with them the tendency to go beyond threatening to leavethe family or withhold money or withhold love. They also tend tocarry you into feelings of righteous power and corresponding phys-ical threats.

Anger carries with it the tendency to go down

the anger chain toward destructive behaviors.

Many families, like Jack and his daughter, tend to increase angerreactions over many years. When Celia was born, Jack could nothave imagined ever slapping her. Now that she is four, he cannotimagine ever becoming murderously angry with her. But the “nat-ural” path of anger is to become more extreme with use. Jack didnot understand that when he began using threats regularly withhis young child, he was setting himself up for getting increasinglyangry over the years. The anger chain also applies to other anger experiences. Jack’sreaction to drivers who cut him off, his wife’s overspending, andmany things in his life that don’t go the way he would like are aptto deteriorate according to his own characteristic version of theanger chain.

Frustrating situations produce escalation in anger along

the anger chain. Individuals have their own unique anger chains.

Some people have a very compact anger chain. When things do

not go the way they want or expect, they start with shouting andimmediately resort to physical attack. Most people think that thesepeople are the only ones who have an anger problem. This is like8 The Anger Habit in Parenting

saying that only people who drink alcohol until they are in a comaevery day have an alcohol problem. The way a person’s anger escalates in a situation that does notgo well for them is the way their anger will escalate over years as aparent. For example, suppose you had a tendency to feel self-important when you were younger. As a result, you sometimes gotinto confrontations with others who did not respond to yourdemands. Then you had a family. You are likely to threaten toleave your family later in life when they don’t respond to yourdemands. When that doesn’t work, you are likely to respond withrighteous fury along with using verbal and physical threats. Self-importance makes other people pay for their non-deference.

Exercise 1-A: What Is My Anger Chain Like?

Using the anger chain as a guide, try to remember your feelings

and actions on two occasions you became very angry outside ofyour role as a parent. Where did you start out on the chain? Wheredid you end up? You need not spend a lot of time trying to diag-nose your anger. The remainder of the book will take you throughan examination of the characteristic patterns of parental anger.The goal here is to recognize that your angry feelings and yourbehaviors have some patterns. An example will help you see how to figure out your angerchain.

Example: Describe a Major Anger Incident

My wife and I got into it big-time a while ago. All I did was toask her if she had gotten the oil changed in her car lately. Sheignored me and I asked again in a louder voice. Soon we wereshouting. I finally said I was getting tired of living with a nitwit. The Anger Chain 9

She slammed the dish she was carrying on the kitchen table andleft the room. I was feeling as if I had not done anything and shejust did not appreciate that I try to take care of things. I got mad-der and madder the more I thought about it. I imagined getting inher face and telling her a thing or two.

Where Does This Incident Put You on the Anger Chain?

Well she is always accusing me of criticizing her. I guess that’sthe way she took my question about her car. When I look at“Critical Comments” on the anger chain and the correspondingfeelings, I think I do feel superior to my wife about many things.When she doesn’t take care of things the way I would, I guess I feelsome contempt. I certainly went quickly down the Chain fromthere through “loud voice” and “shouting” to “name-calling.”When she left the room, it was if I still had to go lower downthe chain.

Describe a Major Anger Incident:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________10 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Your angry behaviors and thoughts when you confront problems

in your life as a whole are likely to set the pattern for your parentinganger. The difference is likely to be that you will be more extreme andgo further down the anger chain in parenting than with adults. Thisis because people tend to feel they have a right to control their chil-dren and, because children are less powerful and less experiencedwith self-defense, they make easier targets than adults. Several things can exaggerate anger. The anger chain is morequickly and easily descended when fear-reducing drugs such asalcohol are involved. Drugs that tend to affect thinking, such asamphetamines, can also give anger a boost. In addition, thosemental illnesses that produce disorganized thinking take peoplequickly down the anger chain. Finally, location can make a major difference. Anger sometimesexplodes down the anger chain if a person feels they are on homeground and someone is seen as an invader. Police persons are right-fully concerned about entering the home of an angry person. The most dangerous combination of factors relating to theanger chain is a person who:

• has a history of violence;

• takes mind-altering drugs; • is intoxicated on alcohol; • has a history of thought-disordered mental illness; and • is at home with family present.

If you have a problem with anger, don’t drink, don’t take drugs,take your prescribed medication for mental illness, and stay awayfrom your family if you are violating any of these. Parental anger can only be cured by finding better ways to par-ent than to try to control children with threats. Much of this bookis devoted to helping parents find alternatives to anger.12 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Parenting involves finding solutions to a long series of problems

extending over many years. Children start out in life smaller thanwe are. They initially readily respond to us when we raise ourvoices or when we make mild threats. This makes it easy for par-ents to use anger to solve problems with children in the beginning.What begins as mild anger has a tendency to grow as has beenillustrated in this chapter, to descend the anger chain. This bookshows parents alternatives to anger as a way to solve the problemsof parenting. Anger easily becomes a habit, a habit that grows and becomesmore destructive. The happiness and well-being of your children,your family, and yourself makes it important to examine the angerhabit. Restoring the family setting to the safe place it is meant tobe so children can grow and learn is worth more than a little effort. Take your time with this book. Changing isn’t easy. It nevercomes by just reading something. That is why there are exercisesincluded in each chapter. Doing them will help you actually makechanges in your everyday life. Most chapters also have suggestions at the end for keeping arecord of successful change. Behavior change is helped enor-mously by recording positive results. You are strongly urged todevote a private notebook to a record of your successes. If youwork at it, you will have many successes to record. Chapter 2 Making and Enforcing RulesSusan’s jaw clenches and her grip tightens on the steering wheel asshe guides the spotless Envoy into her garage. She walks back ontothe drive just to check if her impression was correct. Hands on hips,she surveys the uncut, five-inch grass lawn like a general surveyinga battlefield at the end of a lost battle. Thirteen-year-old John doesn’t hear Susan’s yell from downstairsover the noise of his stereo. His face takes on the disgusted look heusually reserves for his sister as he hears his mother’s angry voiceoutside his door. Five minutes later Susan feels just awful. John feels numb andalone. Susan’s performance is over. John’s stereo is broken; he canno longer play baseball; his allowance is stopped; and he feels hismother hates him. Susan is in her room, carefully hanging up her expensive newsuit. She tries in vain to make herself feel better by casting herthoughts back to a big commission she earned recently at work. She14 The Anger Habit in Parenting

works to exhaustion every day and loves it. But how can she deal with John too? Her face hurts from crying and trying not to cry at the same time. “What will it take to make him obey the rules?” she asks herself. If only he would cooperate.

Our goal as parents is to nurture, protect, teach, and welcome the

young into our culture. We all know that we cannot live togetherin a civilized manner without rules. We all know that childrenneed rules. But what is a rule and what is its purpose in parenting? Do we make rules to control children? If you think your job asa parent is to control your child, your use of rules will be anattempt to control them. Control requires being ready to punish,so consequently you will be ready to be angry. Control involves“making” someone do something, and sooner or later alwayscomes down to having the biggest stick, the most powerful threat,and the willingness to use threats to engender fear. Susan views rules as a way of making John do what she wants.John regularly breaks her rules. For example, “Mow the lawn everyFriday before I get home.” Susan gets more and more angry everytime John breaks her rules. She regularly increases the intensity ofhis punishment. These punishments, made in anger, seemextreme, even to her after she calms down. She regularly backsdown. If you view rules as a way of controlling children, then youwill make breaking rules more and more hurtful. And if childrencontinue to break the rules, more hurt is demanded. Your theoryof control requires that you set up a situation where alternativesto doing what you want children to do are so painful that theywill choose to comply with your rules. For example, they sit andsuffer boredom day after day in a do-nothing class at schoolrather than skipping school and then being grounded, hit, yelledat, or worse. Making and Enforcing Rules 15

Susan doesn’t really want to control John. She instinctively

knows that successful control would require squashing his inde-pendence. Susan likes his independent attitude. But she knows noalternative to punishing John as an attempt to control him. Susan’s problem with John is common today. Many parents seethe need for rules, but don’t know how to administer the rulesexcept by escalating hurtful consequences. Often consequences are“promised” in anger. Because they are too extreme for the parentto actually carry out, except in anger, they are only carried out inanger. An alternative to using rules to control children is to use rules toinfluence children’s control of themselves. This requires changingtwo things that Susan and most parents do:

• Consequences for breaking a rule must stay the same every

time the rule is broken in order to influence children’s self- control. • The enforcement of rules must communicate to children their parent’s unchanging expectations concerning children’s behaviors. So, parents must be present when rules are broken in order to demonstrate those expectations by enforcing them.

We will leave the problem of being present until later in this

chapter. Dealing with it usually involves painstaking examinationof parent’s economic and life-style priorities. For example, Susanlikes nice things—expensive clothes, cars, house, and furnishings.She doesn’t yet realize that the time required to earn enough to buythese things is not their only cost. Less time with John costs herinfluence on John’s self-control. Parents may believe that in order to be effective, rules must beconsistently enforced. But they don’t do it. What is missed is that16 The Anger Habit in Parenting

in order to be consistent, the enforcement must be the same every

time a rule is broken. The reason this is missed is that:

• If parents view rules as a way to control a child’s behavior,

then every time the rule is tested (broken), the parent thinks the rule is defective and throws it away. It didn’t control the child. • They are right. If rules are supposed to control behavior then breaking the rule means it didn’t work. A stronger rule is needed—one with enforcements that hurt the child more. • If the function of rules in parenting is not the parents’ control of children, but children’s control of themselves, consequences of rule infraction needs to be the same every time. • Rules function to inform children of our unshakable expectations concerning their behavior, just as the laws of nature inform them how to behave by giving them consistent consequences. A wall always has the same effect when children bump into it. It doesn’t control children; it influences them to control themselves. They use the door.

Inconsistency in enforcing rules undermines their aid to children’s

feeling of safety and their self-control, just as walls that sometimeslet them through and sometimes don’t would confuse and frightenthem. Children do not automatically know what their futurebehaviors are going to be. If we believe that they will one day liveand flourish in a civilized culture, we must inform children of ourbelief in their future. Rules help us do that if they are ironclad con-sistent. If they change, and so the consequences change, while wewallow all over the place when children misbehave, then rules areanything but definite expectations. As a result, rules are revealed asparental attempts to take control of the child’s behavior. Making and Enforcing Rules 17

As discussed in chapter 3, children will always struggle for con-

trol and the struggle can get very complicated. Even when the par-ent sees the child as a good “Dubie,” and uses escalatingpunishment to enforce rules, the child is likely to have developeda secret life the parent knows nothing about. All of us need to feelin control of ourselves, even when we are children. There are manyways to maintain that sense of autonomy, some more perversethan others, even in the face of tyrannical parental practices. When we get involved with rules as control mechanisms we cutourselves off from our children’s formation of self-determined behav-ior. Control, when successful, produces involuntary behavior.Communication is self-determined behavior and is therefore voluntary.

Rules, viewed as unshakable expectations, influence the child’s

voluntary behavior and leave communication with parents intact. No doors in communication between parent and child are closed with consistent enforcement of parental expectations.

Useful rules are difficult to formulate. They represent things par-

ents really believe the child will eventually do voluntarily.Consequently, parents must be able to believe in their children.This takes faith—belief without evidence—because the very natureof believing something that is not now in evidence, and may notbe in evidence for a long time, requires faith. Rules represent thefaith parents have in their children. A beneficial rule must also be something parents are willing andable to be around to enforce. A rule like, “Don’t watch TV while I’mgone,” isn’t helpful. A rule must state what is expected in terms that are objective inorder to be enforceable. Rules so complicated that they requireinterpretation by a panel of judges cause unnecessary conflict. Forexample, “Clean your room by noon every Saturday” sets a clear18 The Anger Habit in Parenting

objective chore and time, but leaves open how a “clean room” isto be judged. Such rules always lead in the direction of control because theparent is the sole arbiter of when the room is clean. This sets par-ents and children up for an argument. A cleaning or straighteningrule must include a list of criteria for judging when the room iscleaned or straightened. For example, the rule is: “You will clean your room every weekbefore noon on Saturday. The room will be clean when: 1. your bed sheets are removed and put in the laundry basket; 2. your bed is made with clean sheets, hospital style (I’ll show you), and blanket and bedspread on bed with no wrinkles; 3. all of your toys are in the toy box except those you are using in an incomplete game on your worktable; and 4. all of your dirty clothes are put in laundry basket. Nothing dirty can be left in the closet or elsewhere in your room.”

Effective rule enforcers do not need to be hurtful to the child.

This is where push comes to shove. If you think of rules as con-

trollers, you will say, “What? How will the child learn if there is nonegative consequence?” The answer is, “Learn what?” If parents want the child to learn obedience to their wishes,then disobedience should be punished and/or obedience shouldbe rewarded. It doesn’t matter what these rules are. All the trou-bles associated with trying to take charge of another humanbeing’s self-determination will be present. Teaching obedienceworks best if the rules are arbitrary and changing and unreason-able. Military training necessarily teaches soldiers not to ques-tion their superiors or to think, just react. That is control. If thatis what parents want, they needn’t bother too much about rulesother than stating them. Making and Enforcing Rules 19

If parents want their children to learn what they are capable of

and where their behavior is headed, then punishment will nothelp. Persistence in parents’ expectations of their children’s behav-iors is required. An excellent rule enforcer is to simply say in a calm even voice,“The rule is…” This process is no different than teaching children to ride a bike,hit a ball, write their names, or help in the garden. When childrenfall off their bikes, they are not punished. Instead, parents encour-age them to get back on the bike, which reassures children that theirparents definitely believe they will learn to ride. Parents use encour-agement as many times as necessary. This is called expectationenforcement. It would be rule enforcement—that is, an unbreakableexpectation—if it were important for children to ride bikes and par-ents really believed the child would eventually learn to ride thebike. In this case, if the child wanted to give up, parents could say,“The rule is that you will learn to ride your bike.” Because most par-ents don’t care that much about whether their children ever learnto ride, they don’t treat learning to ride a bike as a rule. If a teenage child refuses to go to school, parents will want tohave a rule that says, “You must go to school and stay there untilthe end of every school day.” Enforcement might go like this. It’s seven-thirty in the morning and Ruth isn’t ready for school.Her father stands at her door and says, “You must go to school.”Ruth may say something, throw something, say nothing—it doesn’tmatter. All that matters is whether she gets ready to leave. If shedoesn’t get ready, her father continues to stand at her door and say,“The rule is you must go to school.” (She has “fallen off her bike.”) It’s highly likely in this situation that the father will have to stayat Ruth’s door for a long time. Maybe he will need to miss anappointment or even miss work. When the rule was made in thefirst place, her father was deciding that he would stay with Ruth if20 The Anger Habit in Parenting

necessary. It was also likely that Ruth would pick a day to refusegoing to school that would be very awkward for her father if hehad to stay with her. Eventually—probably after a giant, loud, per-haps destructive, and perhaps profane temper tantrum—Ruth willbecome calm and ask her father to take her to school. He will havedone nothing the whole time except stand outside her doorwayand repeat the rule. He did not respond to any provocation; he didnot answer any of her attacks (“What are you, a robot?”). This isan example of a useful rule, consistently enforced. If Ruth had grown up with rule enforcement similar to thisexample she probably wouldn’t have created the situation in thefirst place. It is never too late to start altering approaches, even ifit produces a blowup the first time. It is never too late to threatenless and to become more persistent and consistent in enforcing afew rules. Once several parental rules are established as unchangingexpectations, parents become a more believable source of infor-mation for children. Communication is possible because wordsaren’t used to control the child. The child can understand the par-ents’ comment, “Your grades will not get you into the school youwant to go to,” as information. It is not launching an attempt tomake children study. This results in the child’s actually thinkingabout what to do, and often talking over what to do with a parent. When rules are used to control, and then thrown away in favorof more punishing consequences when they don’t work, childrenincreasingly listen to their parents for signals of control instead offor information. They become experts at complying with the rulesand hiding their own secret areas of self-determination. Or theyavoid their parents as much as possible. Often they do both. Theywill go elsewhere to learn what to expect of themselves, to friends,gangs, TV, and music. These are common sources of informationconcerning how people of their age behave, talk, and believe. Making and Enforcing Rules 21

These are not good influences for obvious reasons. Except forfriends, these sources care nothing for the children they influence.And friends know as little as any child does.

Exercise 2-A: Practice with Rules

as Persistent Expectations

It is important that you not try to solve big problems with rules.Big problems—like serious and hurtful fighting among children,alcohol and drug use, serious law violations—require problem solv-ing, establishment of communication, commitment, and time.Where law violations are involved, it is important to let the legalprocess take place. Laws are not rules. They represent our collectivepower to protect ourselves from being endangered by others. Ifyour child is a danger to others, action is required to reduce thatdanger. Your child’s welfare should come second to the safety andwelfare of those who are threatened. Think of three small things that you would expect from yourchild. Make a useful rule for each of these. “Useful” means that youare willing and able to be present to enforce it; it is specific enoughso that the child readily recognizes its completion; and it has anenforcement that you are able and willing to stick with. For example, Susan’s rule at the beginning of the chapter thatJohn mow the lawn on Friday when she isn’t at home is not a goodrule. Susan would need to be home on Fridays and she would needto list what she meant by a completely mowed lawn. Does thatinclude taking care of the clippings? How much trimming wouldbe involved? Tasks around the house are perfect opportunities for parents towork on with their children in a cooperative way. There are fewopportunities in modern life for parents and children to be22 The Anger Habit in Parenting

together, working cooperatively. Susan shouldn’t throw away the

chance to work with John on the lawn. Here are two examples that will help you get started.

Example 1: Rule and Enforcement

George will clean up after himself at the end of every meal. Iwill say, “The rule is that you clean up for yourself after eating.”Revise If Needed in Order to Make Clearer The problem is with clean up. I should tell George, perhaps poston the refrigerator, that it means taking his dishes to the sink, rins-ing them, and putting them in the dishwasher. If the dishwasherhas clean dishes in it, he can leave the rinsed dishes in the sink.Are You Committed to Being Present to Enforce the Rule? Now that I think about it, I’m going to have to always wait toleave the table until George is finished eating. Thursday’s I usuallyget a quick snack and leave for bowling. Maybe I can get a laterstart time.Will You Be Willing to Always Reinforce in the Same Way? I think so, although I’m going to have trouble staying calm if hetries to run out with an excuse before completing the chore. Whatwill I do? It seems silly to think of going after him, perhaps to aball game, and stand there and say, “The rule is…” But I guessthat’s what I’m signing up for.

Example 2: Rule and Enforcement

Jean will get ready for bed starting at nine every school night. Iwill say, “The rule is that you start to get ready for bed at nineevery school night.”Revise If Needed in Order to Make Clearer The problem is getting ready for bed. I need a list of what thatmeans posted in her room. 1. Put toys back in toy box. Making and Enforcing Rules 23

2. Take off clothes for bath and put them in hamper.

3. …Are You Committed to Being Present to Enforce the Rule? Alice and I are both taking evening classes. One of us is alwaysat home. This means that Alice and I must agree on the details ofthe rule and present it to Jean together.Will You Be Willing to Always Reinforce in the Same Way? I can see Jean having a temper tantrum if I continue to say, “Therule is…” when she wants to just finish her game. But I think I cancontinue to repeat the rule in the same tone of voice. At least Iknow now what I’m going to do. I never know what to do whenJean gets upset. I end up being angry. This seems better.

Rule and Enforcement:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________24 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Will You Be Willing to Always Reinforce in the Same Way?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________26 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Are You Committed to Being Present to Enforce the Rule?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Making and Enforcing Rules 27

Establishing your credibility as someone who expects certain

behavior from your children, and never settling for less, is impor-tant. It leads to all kinds of benefits. The most important is that itopens the door for children to think of themselves as willing par-ticipants in the family. Occasionally children encounter a teacherwho will not settle for poor, sloppy, wrong, or incomplete work.Instead of punishing the child with a bad grade, the teacher keepshanding unacceptable work back and says, “I expect you to do thiscorrectly.” Children learn from the teacher that they have the abil-ity to be successful in life. Such teachers make all the difference inchildren’s lives. Parents who consistently hand back unacceptable behavior tochildren do not need to be angry, especially if they say, “I expectyou to do this correctly.” Children then learn that they have theability to behave in acceptable ways. Such parents make all the dif-ference in children’s lives. Two common problems that parents today have in making rulesinclude:

• Consequences for breaking a rule must stay the same every

time the rule is broken in order to be effective. • The parent must be present in order to enforce a rule when it is broken.28 The Anger Habit in Parenting

The second of these, being present, involves major questions con-

cerning one’s life style, values, goals, and trade-offs. Susan expectsher son John to do as he’s told whether she’s around or not or hasa relationship with him or not. As a single mother, she has some-thing to prove. She values her success in business and independ-ence from a controlling ex-husband. She works hard. She lovesJohn. But she hasn’t ordered her priorities consciously. She has letthe demands of her job, her feelings while shopping, resentmenttoward controlling men, and many other things get out of hercontrol. Susan only has a few more years to parent John. She would dowell to examine her working hours. She might find that adjustingher values and commitments—her housing, her car, and herexpensive clothes—so that she would have enough time andmoney to be home when John is there. Many parents, even parents living on two incomes, earn so lit-tle that providing food and shelter requires them to be gone fromhome. In any case parents should not make rules that they will notbe home to enforce. Put more bluntly, parents should face the factthat children have a poor chance of becoming civilized humanbeings if other children, TV, and computer games parent them. Every family situation is different and has its own complications.None are perfect. I’ve known no perfect parents, including myself.We do the best we can. But it helps to know what you would liketo do ideally. An example of the ideal way of parenting is:

• Have a few useful rules.

• Be present. • Have good communication. • Have the credibility that transforms our faith in our children into their expectations for themselves. Making and Enforcing Rules 29

The economic demands and other realities of life concerning our

partners and ourselves make perfection seem far off. But we can atleast regularly review what we are doing as parents and why. Do weneed to belong to that organization? Do we need this adult toy? Dowe really want to mortgage our futures by borrowing to buy thatvehicle? Do we need to live here? What compromises are we mak-ing in parenting so that we earn the money to pay for that vaca-tion? These and other questions concerning values and life style havebeen asked by millions of people. They sometimes change theirlives for the sake of their children. It is worth considering.

Practice Record for Chapter 2

One of the biggest problems parents have regarding rules is that we

tend to make hundreds of them. We make a new rule every timewe say something like, “Pick that up.” “Don’t disturb yourmother.” “Leave your brother alone.” “Be back on time.” Obviously, we aren’t prepared to carefully carry out enforcementand consistency with dozens of pronouncements. In this chapterwe have seen that just making one rule requires much thought.Yet, we stick ourselves, and our children, with an avalanche ofrules. Working toward a few effective rules means the need to stopthoughtlessly making so many of them. It means learning to talkto your children a bit differently. Mostly it means carefully dis-tinguishing between statements that are rules and statementsthat are requests or observations. “Pick that up,” is a rule thatneeds to be enforced. “Would you pick that up?” or “Youdropped something” are not rules. One is a request. The other ismerely an observation.30 The Anger Habit in Parenting

It will help if you record your progress in making useful rules

and reducing bad ones. Devote three or four pages in your privatenotebook to “Progress with Rules.” Here are two examples of the sorts of things that will be helpfulfor you to record.

Example 1: Caught Myself before I Made Rules

Mike went running through the house after school, just yellinglike a banshee. I started to shout at him to stop it. I caught myselfand thought, “What do I want here? I’d like him to calm down. Iwouldn’t know how to make or carry out a rule that said he mustbe calm or even quiet without making it absurd. What to do? Istopped what I was doing and stood in the door to the living roomuntil he came around again. I swooped him up and said, “Youseem to be happy. Tell me about what you’re doing.” He giggled and we ended up having a nice talk. I’m proud ofmyself when I think of where this incident might have gone, withme screaming at Mike and him crying.

Example 2: Enforced the Bedtime Rule Well

Heather has been responding pretty well all week to our rulethat says get ready for bed at nine. Last night she started with,“Can’t I just finish this puzzle?” I repeated the rule. She threw thepuzzle on the floor and said, “I hate you.” I repeated the rule. Shescreamed, “No.” I repeated the rule. She fell down on the floor andkicked and screamed. I waited until she was finished and repeatedthe rule. She got up and started picking up the puzzle, and by thetime she was in the tub she was laughing. I wouldn’t have believeda month ago that I could behave that way or that she could either. Chapter 3 Who’s in Control Here?”Don’t you need to go potty?” Sammy looks up at his mother. He says the all-time favorite wordthat two-year-olds use, “No!” Karen asks again, “Are you sure? Let’s go and try.” Sammy yells, “No!!” He glares at his mother and then turns andstarts to run as she takes a step toward him. “I’m not going to chase you, Sammy. You’ve been such a goodboy. Why don’t we just go try potty?” As Sammy turns toward her Karen immediately recognizes theexpression on his face. His eyes fixed in the distance, muscles tense,breathing stopped, he’s pooping his pants. Karen’s strong aversiontoward that dirty aspect of life explodes through her defenses.Unconsciously rolling Sammy together with her discomfort about hissmelly pants, ice enters her voice. “You little shit.”32 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Sammy’s screaming pierces the quiet apartment as Karen

advances on him angrily. The sound of a loud slap, followed by a second of silence, and then even louder screaming interrupts a conversation between a very frail woman and her very fat cat living on the floor below. Sammy and Karen are going to have a difficult life together. Why? Because they both want the same thing—control over Sammy.

All human beings want control of their own behaviors. And mosthuman beings think they want control of other people’s behaviorsas well, particularly their family’s behaviors. These two wants arein opposition and will cause conflict. Parents cannot rear their children peacefully if they think theymust control their children’s behaviors. In order to grow intoindividuals, children must strive for control over themselves—self-control. Children are born to battle for self-control, auton-omy, just as you feel you need to breathe. If someone puts a handover your mouth and nose, you will struggle, as will your child.To grow into a responsible person means we must be responsiblefor what we do—our behavior must be under our control. If we tryto substitute our wills for our children’s wills, they will struggle tobreathe the air of freedom.

Parents’ anger is a natural result of the conflict with

children over control of childhood behaviors. Parents want children to learn certain behaviors, but do they really need to control their children?

The Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud found that toilet train-

ing was the source of much mischief in parent-child relationships.This is true for a good reason. It bares the bones of the nature ofthe parent-child struggle for control over the child. Who’s in Control Here? 33

What does Karen really want from Sammy? Doesn’t she wantSammy to control his body functions? Then why doesn’t she allowhim to exercise that control? Surely she does not want to decide forhim when he goes to the bathroom for the rest of his life. Sammy’slack of control upsets Karen. She wants control over his self-control.

Parents often want to control their children’s self-control, but no

such control can exist. Either children control some behavior of theirs or someone else does. Control of children’s self-control amounts to stamping out children’s self-control.

Sammy’s toilet training is only an example of the struggle for con-

trol that he will wage as he grows up. It is easy to identify the prob-lem in the case of toilet training because it is obvious that Karenreally wants Sammy to control himself. Who else can control hisbody functions? At the same time, Karen can’t let go of her desire to make Sammycontrol himself. This same contradiction of who is in charge willbe a source of difficulty between them many times in the future,especially where it is not so obvious what Karen really wants. What will happen later in school if Sammy brings home badgrades? The question, “Who else can control Sammy’s schoolbehavior?” seems more important than, “Who else can controlSammy’s body functions?” Most parents want their children tocontrol their own behavior, and grow up to be people who:

• do what’s right because it’s right, not because they might get caught doing something wrong; • are good family members because they want to be, not because others will be critical of them if they aren’t; and • are happy and successful at work they love, not at work others expect.34 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Parents can never really control their children except by instilling

perpetual fear to act on their own, or by actually breaking them,emptying them of initiative and self-determination. This leavessomeone who is always waiting for orders. Children are not that easy to “break.” Often, what appears to beparental control is actually behavior the child displays (controls)that is carried out involuntarily by the child.

Parents often do not control their children’s behavior,

but they can make it involuntary.

Self-controlled involuntary behaviors occur when children:

• do what’s right because they fear getting caught if they don’t

do so; • are good family members because others would be critical of them if they weren’t; and • do the work (possibly even very successfully) that others choose for them.

And perhaps the most bitter result of all:

• these children make it appear to their parents and others

that they are living a voluntary and self-determined life.

The most important lesson that controlling parents teach their

children is to give the appearance that they are doing willinglywhat their parents chose for them to do. This has the advantage ofavoiding their parents’ disapproval and punishment as well asgaining their parents’ and the community’s approval. The disad-vantage for children who learn this lesson is that most of whatthey do in life will feel involuntary. Who’s in Control Here? 35

Children as well as adults can be made to show that they love what they are doing. But they cannot make themselves feel free while doing this.

Sally studies hard, is always home on time, and never shows dis-appointment when her parents tell her “No.” Her mother says,“Sally has such a good attitude!” Sally’s attitude is not about doing homework or coming home ata certain hour or never being disappointed. It is about pleasing herparents. Once she does that she also hides her feeling that home-work is involuntary, coming home on time is a drag, and getting a“no” from her parents usually seems arbitrary and unfair on herparents’ part. Pleasing her parents also means letting them thinkshe does these things freely—that she wants to do them. That reallypleases them. To many people, parenting means the management of theirchildren through control. Attempts to control inevitably lead toconflict and anger. Control means heading off unwanted behaviorswith the threat of aversive consequences. Good sheepdogs are called “headers.” They run to get in frontthe sheep and turn them around by barking and threats of biting.Controlling parents must be good headers. They must get in frontof where their children wish to go. Their anger and displeasurealways remains a potential threat to their children. But they neednot show their anger and displeasure as their children learn toplease them or comply with their wishes. When children have learned to be controlled by their parents,they have learned how not to be bitten; that is, they have learnedhow not to displease their parents. Parents are not in control ofthese behaviors, children are. But the children feel the behaviorsare involuntary. Children choose to carry out the behaviors. Butthey feel coerced.36 The Anger Habit in Parenting

There is an alternative approach to child management—manage-

ment with consistent rules, that is, management with consistentexpectations. This method is detailed extensively in chapter 2. It is very important for parents to realize that:

• When we choose control as a child-rearing technique, we

have also chosen to use anger and upset during the time we live with our children.

The opposite is also true:

• When we find ourselves angry and upset with our children,

we have adopted control as a child-rearing technique.

Exercise 3-A: Recognizing Control as Your

Method of Child Management

Recall an incident when you became upset and/or angry with a

child. What happened? What did you expect the child to do afterthe incident? Why? Who was in control of what the child did?How did the child exert control? Try to write out your answers forthree different anger incidents. Here are two examples to help you.

Example 1: What Happened?

Our teenage daughter snuck out of the house after ten o’clockon a weekday night. We discovered that she was gone and startedcalling her friends. After two hours of agony she returned. Shetried to make her behavior our fault because we’re too strict. Shewas so sassy about it I slapped her. I didn’t sleep all night, listen-ing for noises from her room. I don’t think my husband did either. Who’s in Control Here? 37

What Did You Expect the Child to Do After the Incident?

Well, we grounded her. I guess we expected her to learn a lessonand not sneak out again, although I don’t know if either of us hadany real confidence that she would comply.Why? I’m not sure why we would think she wouldn’t do it again. Iguess it comes down to whether she’ll obey our rules. If she doesn’t,we just have to punish her further.Who Was in Control of What the Child Did? I guess we are trying to make her do what we want her to do.That would mean we would be in control of her behavior. But sheisn’t doing what we want. So I guess that means she’s in control.How Did the Child Exert Control? We try to make her behave according to our rules. I guess gettingupset with her and tough with her is our way of trying to do this.But she’s in control. How? I guess she’s naturally in control of whatshe does. Oh, I think I see! The incident was about two things, notone. It was about who controls her and about not sneaking out. Idon’t see how we’ll ever win control. Maybe we shouldn’t try.

Example 2: What Happened?

My son hangs around after school with some boys objectionableto us. I’ve told him not to do so and to come straight home. I relyon my neighbor to tell me when he gets home, and she told me hedidn’t get home until five o’clock. When I got back, I told him hewas grounded all weekend. He just said, “Yeah, right.” He kind ofsmiled and I blew up. I grabbed him and screamed right in his facethat he’s going to do what I say.What Did You Expect the Child to Do after the Incident? I expected him to shape up. Well, maybe not expected. I was try-ing to make him shape up. I was more scared this wasn’t going towork than confident that it would.38 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Why? When he was little, if I got real upset with him he would softenand say, “I’m sorry, Mommy.” I don’t really know how to controlhim now.Who Was in Control of What the Child Did? He was. What I’m afraid of is that those punks he hangs outwith will get him into trouble. I guess it’s me against them for con-trol of him.How Did the Child Exert Control? I can’t put a leash on him. All he has to do is ignore my wishes.I can try to punish him. That used to make a difference. But it justmakes things worse now. He just takes it or ignores it.

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Who’s in Control Here? 39

How Did the Child Exert Control?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________40 The Anger Habit in Parenting

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Why?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Who’s in Control Here? 41

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________42 The Anger Habit in Parenting

How Did the Child Exert Control?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Who’s in Control Here? 43

Control and anger go together. You cannot attempt to control

another human being without displaying some way to make theperson feel bad if they don’t do what you want them to do. Thismeans that, whether you use it or not, you must have the power toattack them. Displaying a readiness to attack is what anger is about.Raised voices, verbal threats, and aggressive body stances areamong the ways parents attempt to control their children. The best we can do, if we go the control route, is to produce chil-dren who hide why they do what they do from us. They will main-tain self-control by voluntarily agreeing to what we want. But isthis the same as doing what we want them to do voluntarily? No!Here are two examples. 1. Charles joins the marines voluntarily. • Charles is making a voluntary choice to do what he is told to do by his military superiors. • Charles is told by his sergeant to clean the latrine with a toothbrush. He would never volunteer to do this nasty job. He does it involuntarily. 2. You voluntarily sign a mortgage agreement to buy a house. • Are the making of the payments voluntary? What if you skipped them for a while? Don’t you say to yourself, “I must make my mortgage payment?” • What if all your behaviors felt the same as paying your mortgage? If you did everything because you must do it, would you feel free?

Children may freely choose to do what their parents tell them to

do. This is easy for young children who are just as tuned in to theirparents’ distress as the parents are to children’s distress. But thisdoesn’t make going to bed at their parents’ demand seem voluntary.44 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Children may also shield parents from realizing they are merelycomplying. This keeps parents from being upset by making chil-dren appear to want to do the very things that parents want themto do. Yet, what these “good” children do merely complies withparental wishes. What the child does is done involuntarily. These children may maintain compliance in most of theirbehaviors at the expense of making their lives feel involuntary. Asadults, they will experience the same fate; they will feel that theyhave to drag themselves through life while trying to please others. Skeptical parents may say, “What about children who are justwillful? They want what they want. We need to punish children sothat they see they can’t just have everything they want.” It is true that young children are not naturally very compliant.Let’s face it; they are not truly civilized. A child born today is notthat different from a child born fifty thousand years ago. If chil-dren are left to grow up without adult influence, only influencingone another, they will learn to act as barbarians do—pillage,destroy, and kill. If our children are to grow into civilized peoplewe must teach them what civilized behavior is.

Learning to become civilized does mean learning cooperation

instead of battling to get what you want.

Learning to become civilized does not mean

learning to give up self-control.

Control over oneself is something we would like children to retain

in a civilized culture. When we perceive children as willful, it is notbecause they just can’t exist without getting their way. It’s becausethey refuse to submit to loss of control. They want control and willfight for it. But the struggle is over who will control them, not overgetting what they want. Who’s in Control Here? 45

Two-year-olds who reach for everything in sight are exercising

the same self-control that they did when they were in the playpenreaching for one toy after another. Trying to teach them not totouch coffee table decorations is easily mixed up with trying toteach them that parents are in charge of their touching move-ments; that is, they must check with their parents before touchinganything. Parents who are not after control of their children putthings they don’t want touched out of reach until concepts likeproperty and fragility and value can be taught to children. Children learn soon enough that they can’t have everythingthey want, assuming they don’t have someone satisfying theirevery whim. They learn this without our having to control them.The world will teach them.

When children will not back off from demanding what they want, the struggle is usually about their need to keep a sense of control over themselves, not about getting the particular thing they want.

What we see as willful children are often those who will not give upself-control. It is important to distinguish between the struggle tomaintain autonomy—the ability to direct one’s own behavior—andthe struggle to get what one wants regardless of other people’s rights.

Examples for Distinguishing the Struggle for Self-Control

from the Struggle to Have One’s WayYou will feel less inclined to try to control your child if you recognizethat the child needs and wants self-control. If you see that you don’tneed to or want to substitute your will for the child’s will, you canbe much less inclined to become angry and attack the child. Read the following examples and then think of two experiencesyou have had being angry with a child that might have beenviewed in a different way.46 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Example 1: We had difficulty with our eighteen-month-old child at bed-time. We had a routine set up for the same time each night, butwhen I picked him up to carry him to his room and put him intobed, he would scream bloody murder. I assumed that he just didnot want to go to bed and was trying to stay up. A friend suggestedthat maybe he would like to have more control of himself whengoing to bed, so I might try letting him walk to his bedroom ratherthan carrying him. The next night, after his bedtime routine, I asked him if hewould like to walk to his bed. He stood still for a minute and I said,“Come on,” and started toward his room. To my amazement hecame walking along. When I reached down for his hand he heldon to my finger and we walked together to his room.

Example 2: We had difficulty with our seven-year-old obeying. She woulddrive me nuts when I asked her to do something. She would juststand there or simply continue what she had been doing. I wouldraise my voice and would end up yelling at her. One time I lost itand just went at her and started hitting her on the butt. A friend suggested that after I ask her to do something, or askher any question, I wait. In other words, once I put the ball in hercourt I should wait for the return. I tried doing this. I had to stuffa sock in it when she didn’t answer for a long minute. And then,miracle of miracles, without looking at me she got up from thefloor and went out to the kitchen, got the wastebasket, and startedpicking up the pieces of scrap paper that I had asked her to cleanup. I about fell over. I’ve been doing more waiting for her to respond since then, andeven when she doesn’t do what I ask, she eventually says some-thing like, “I don’t want to.” I just ask again and wait. Who’s in Control Here? 47

Example 3: My teenage daughter got very upset with me when I told her shecouldn’t wear a see-through blouse she had purchased. Shescreamed and called me names and threatened to leave home. Herreaction was so extreme that it startled me. I’ve never seen her reactlike that over not getting her way. A friend suggested to me that perhaps her reaction wasn’t somuch about the blouse. Maybe she was more concerned aboutbeing able to control what she wore than about wearing that par-ticular item. I brought this up with my daughter. It started an avalanche ofwords. She said she had bought the blouse with her own moneyand didn’t see what I had to do with it. She said she was sodepressed and couldn’t see how she could ever control her own lifewhile she lived with me. She went on and on about feelings ofwanting to please me but also feeling that I took advantage of herand treated her like a slave. I ordered her around and didn’t evenlisten to her. It was quite an earful. I told her what my friend had said. She thought for a minuteand said, “You know, that’s exactly it. I don’t really care about thatawful blouse. It’s just that when you told me to take it back, I sud-denly felt so suffocated. And like I’d never be able to breathe whileI’m living with you.”

Example 4: My teenage son got poor grades. When I approached him abouthis report card, I told him this just had to stop. I said he needed tobring his grades up to all Bs or better before he could drive the car anymore. He blew up and then I really blew up. We were accusing eachother of everything in the book. I was hot. He just would not listen. I told a friend about this incident. She suggested that maybe myson was more concerned about his newfound sense of independence48 The Anger Habit in Parenting

when he was able to drive than about having to study more. I said,“Well good, then maybe he’ll get going on his grades.” My friendsaid, “The sense of self-control, the sense of being an individual,doesn’t work like that. He’s more likely not to study in order tohang on to a feeling of individuality than he is to try to buy it fromyou. Being a person in charge of ourselves is not something thatany of us will trust to another if the other has shown that he or shewill use it to try to control us. Think of how you would respond tosome man who told you he’d treat you like an equal if you’d learnto cook properly. He’d probably end up with a cup of pepper in hisstew just before you went out the door with the kids.” I told my son about what my friend had said. Instead of dash-ing off with an excuse, like he usually does, he sat down and wasvery quiet for a bit. Just when I was about to break the silence hesaid, “Let me get this straight. Your friend thinks I want controlover myself, and that when you took the car away it was sort of likea setback to me.” I didn’t say anything. He began to talk in a live-lier way. He said that my friend was incredibly right about what heplanned to do. Studying to him now felt like a defeat. He didn’t feelgood about it. He was planning to get a job and leave school. We talked for a long time. I told him how frightened I was forhim and how I tried to control him in order to reduce my fear. Ibegan to see that I needed to tell him my concerns about hisgrades and his future and turn the problem over to him. I will keepon top of noting what his grades are and help him whenever heasks, but it’s up to him to do the work. He seemed to grow right in front of my eyes. The next semesterhe got two Bs and three As. All of a sudden he’s interested in school. Who’s in Control Here? 49

Practice Record For Chapter 3

It will be helpful if you keep track of your successes in reducing

your anger in parenting. Set aside two or three pages in a privatenotebook and title them:

Success in Not Struggling with My Child for Control

Using the examples above, look at your interaction with yourchild when he or she attempts to maintain individuality throughself-control. Write down the first two successes in giving your childroom to maintain his or her self-control. Chapter 4 Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children

Jimmy watches his mother’s eyes overflow as she reads. She turnsaway from Jimmy, a move that means to him that he has really hurthis mother once again. His report card is making her cry. He wantsto disappear, but he tried that three years ago when he was nineafter he saw a movie on TV where a man could become invisible.That’s when Jimmy stood in front of his mirror for hours, eyes closed,trying hard to make himself disappear. He didn’t succeed. Finally Mona focuses on him and what he dreads most of all begins. “How can you keep doing this to me? I worry about you night andday and now I find out that you’ve been lying to me about yourschoolwork.”His mother’s voice rises and the words come faster. Jimmy beginsto cry.52 The Anger Habit in Parenting

“After all I do for you, I would think you would cry, you little ingrate. Your father doesn’t care enough about you to even see you once a year. I work and sacrifice and have no life of my own, just to take care of you. Then you lie to me? And you don’t even bother to study or do your homework?” Mona is almost yelling. Jimmy wants his mother to stop talking. He doesn’t know quite why except he gets an awful feeling when his mother is this unhappy. It becomes a hundred times worse when she talks like this. Mona stops shouting as Jimmy’s crying becomes louder. She pauses for a minute, waiting with grim satisfaction for his hurt to last just a bit longer. Then she starts to feel sorry for him and says, “Oh, Jimmy. It’s okay. You’re a big boy now. Come here and hug me.” As she wipes tears from his face she says, “You’re all I have. You mean everything to me. We can get through anything. But you’ve got to do better in school. Much better. Do you think you can do that?” Jimmy nods.

Anger is about control. Its goal is to make someone feel bad whenthey don’t do what you want them to do. So any way of makingsomeone feel bad can become a tool of anger and control. A handyway to make our loved ones feel bad, including children, is todemonstrate that they hurt us.

When you hurt, people who love you feel bad.

When the people who love you are the ones who are responsible for your hurt, they feel especially bad.

You can make people feel bad if you show them they are responsi-ble for hurting you. Being and acting hurt are ways of being angry,of attempting to control those who love you. It is a natural thingfor us to tell a loved one when they are hurting us. “Ouch! Stop Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 53

that.” We depend on the other person caring about our “ouch.” It

isn’t control. It tells them the effect their actions have on us. Most children love their parents in much the same way that theirparents love them. They don’t want anything bad to happen to theirparents. They will take care of their parents as much as they can.Because children care for their parents, children hurt when parentsare unhappy or upset. They want their parents to feel good. This isthe basis for wanting to please parents. Children are delighted to beable to make their parents laugh and smile. As a result:

• Being upset can become a parent’s tool for controlling children.

• Being prepared to be upset with any objectionable behavior of children can become a parent’s job.

Mona sees her job of parenting Jimmy as correcting any wrong

behavior. Her way of correcting him is to be unhappy with him. Soshe has made a habit of being ready to be unhappy. Her misery hasbeen an effective control technique for his first twelve years. It willnot continue to control him much longer. Not that she will loseher capacity to make him feel bad. He will increasingly learn to feelbad and displease her anyway. Mona senses that this change is about to happen, but knows noway to avoid it. Jimmy’s father fled their marriage years ago. Hecould not continue to be responsible for so much grief in a wife heloved. Mona tried every way that she knew to be unhappy in orderto bring him back, including a serious suicide attempt. At the endof their relationship, the more distress she showed because of hisleaving, the more determined he was to get away. Jimmy is also showing signs of staying away. He’s more silentwhen he’s with his mother. He doesn’t come home from schoolright away. He spends a lot of time in his room, even though thestereo and TV are downstairs in the living room.54 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Mona’s response to Jimmy’s changing behavior is to express

additional distress to him about his behavior. This will drive himfurther away, which will in turn result in her being more dis-tressed. As this cycle escalates, a pall will spread over the housethat is similar to the period just before her husband left. Avoiding what’s ahead requires Mona to turn her belief aboutwhat causes her misery upside down. She thinks Jimmy causesher to feel miserable. But misery is something she uses in herattempts to control him. Mona attempts to control Jimmy bymaking him feel bad about hurting her when he scares or dis-pleases her. She firmly believes that her husband caused herunhappiness, and now her son is following suit. It will be verydifficult for her to let go of her unhappiness. She feels as if beinghappy would mean giving permission to Jimmy to do whateverhe pleases. It seems to her that giving up misery means taking achance that Jimmy would leave her. In reality, the opposite istrue. Letting him off her misery hook is the only way she has achance of keeping Jimmy close. She must give him the chance tolove her voluntarily. Taking this chance is certainly worth it to both of them. Monawill not only lose her misery, she will gain a son who spends timewith her because he wants to be there. And Jimmy will gain ahappy parent. He will no longer carry the burden of his mother’sunhappiness. In discussing both rules and control—and now unhappiness—as anger, it becomes obvious that reducing anger in parentinginvolves significant personal change. You can’t continue to parentas you have been and just press a magic button to produce modelchildren.

Change in ourselves is required

if we are going to change our children. Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 55

There is a very large reward in stopping the use of unhappiness as

a way of attempting to control our loved ones. Getting rid ofunhappiness we use as anger gets rid of much of our unhappinessaltogether. When someone close to you hurts you, it’s worthwhile to lethim or her know it by displaying your distress. In this case unhap-piness serves as communication. But most of our unhappiness,especially as parents, is meant to attack, to control, to make some-one feel bad. Giving that up means freeing you from a thousandcloudy days.

You do a great thing for your children and yourself if you are happy.

You relieve your children of the burden

of being responsible for your unhappiness.

You relieve yourself from the burden

of suffering that was meant to punish your children.

You will want to keep expressing hurt as feedback—communica-

tion—in relationships with children and others. If someone ishelping you move a table and your finger gets pinched, you wouldcertainly like to say, “Ouch! Stop pushing.” In the same way, if yourhusband or college-age child starts spending money in a way thatfrightens you about finances, you will certainly want to say, “Youare scaring me with your spending. We need to talk.” The use of distress to control children is what you may wish togive up. Practice distinguishing between communication of distressand distress as a method for control by doing the following exercise.56 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Exercise 4-A: Recognizing the Difference

between Distress That Is Communication and Distress That Is Control

The ultimate expression of angry distress is the suicide of a physi-

cally healthy person. Look at the result. The person is gone. Thefamily, friends, acquaintances, and perhaps those in a close rela-tionship are left to suffer. Many of them will carry the hurt theyexperience for life. This is why suicide is the marker for the ultimatein anger and at the bottom of the anger chain. (See chapter 1.) In looking at your own distress and unhappiness as a parent,you might use as a marker any feeling that you wish the child tosuffer. Like the classic suicidal thought, “Then they’ll be sorry,”Mona’s torturing of Jimmy was only satisfactory when she sawhim in pain. Her distress lifted and was replaced by loving concernwhen Jimmy sobbed uncontrollably, when he was sorrowful.

Wanting the child to hurt is your cue that you are using distress instead of just communicating it. Communication, saying “ouch,” doesn’t require the other person to feel hurt.

Recount three incidents where a child upset you. See if you wantedto make the child suffer by recognizing how upset you were. Try toestimate how much less distress you would have gone through ifyou had only let the child know she or he had done somethingthat distressed you. These two examples will get you started.

Example 1: What Happened?

Penny was still not home at one o’clock on a Saturday night.Her curfew was 11:30. My wife and I were scared out of our wits. Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 57

We called her friends’ houses and woke their parents up. No onehad a clue. Finally, Penny came driving in at 1:15. I was veryangry and her mother was crying. We emphasized how scaredshe had made us. We brought up a neighbor who had been afriend of hers and was killed in an auto accident. I kept yellingand her mother kept crying until Penny finally started cryingtoo.Did You Feel You Wanted Your Child to Hurt? I think so. I wanted her to feel bad. I kept it up until she cried.Now I remember why I brought up her friend who died. I knew itwould get to her.How Much Suffering Would Have Been Saved if You JustCommunicated Distress? It would have saved most of a painful night if we had told Pennyhow worried we were and what we did to try and find her. Wecould all have gone to sleep and then talked about what happenedin the morning when everyone was calm.

Example 2:What Happened? Joe, my three-year-old, suddenly ran away from me as we werecoming out of the mall. He was laughing and ran right across thestreet into the parking lot. I caught him, thankfully before any-thing bad happened. I was crying and saying to him, “Don’t youever do that again!” He still tried to laugh, as if it had been agame. I kept telling him how scared I was and how he could havebeen killed. He stopped laughing. And then I really lit into himwith how frightened he had made me, how I would have felt if Ihad had to pick his dead and bleeding body up off the street. Hestarted bawling.Did You Feel You Wanted Your Child to Hurt? Definitely. I wasn’t going to stop until he felt as bad as I did.58 The Anger Habit in Parenting

How Much Suffering Would Have Been Saved if You Just

Communicated Distress? The whole thing after he stopped laughing. I would havecalmed down much faster. It’s a wonder I didn’t get in an accidentdriving home. I don’t see what good it did. I can’t trust him to stayout of traffic anyway. I just have to hold on to him better.

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Did You Feel You Wanted Your Child to Hurt?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 59

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Did You Feel You Wanted Your Child to Hurt?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________60 The Anger Habit in Parenting

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Did You Feel You Wanted Your Child to Hurt?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 61

Parents can find themselves being the “happiness police.”

Without realizing it, they can become the guardians of serious-ness. Perhaps you’ve seen this happen to friends. Someoneyou’ve known growing up was as much a prankster and good-time Charlie as anyone of your acquaintances. You haven’t seenthe person for a while and perhaps there is a chance to becomereacquainted. You may try to joke and play in the way you used to do whenthe two of you were children. Your joke attempts are met with aserious or even offended response. Your friend wants to talk aboutthe dangerous changes that are taking place in communities andfamilies. Maybe he turns the conversation to the dangerous state ofthe world, particularly the misbehaviors of children and their lackof discipline. You ask yourself, “Can this be the person I knew? Thekid who didn’t do his homework? The kid who skipped school withme? The kid who made up off-color names for our teachers?Doesn’t he remember what he was like?” This “childhood amnesia” results from your friend’s assumptionthat being a parent is serious business—meaning that being a par-ent requires being serious, stern, and solemn. Some parents learn to carry a bucket of mud, always ready tothrow at their children’s futures if the children show signs of mov-ing in a direction they disapprove of. The mud in the bucket is62 The Anger Habit in Parenting

actually anger. It is refilled by talking to others about the negative

state of children in general. Some say, “Misery loves company.” Misery as an attack on chil-dren finds company in the willingness of every generation to viewthe next as having gone to the dogs. In the schoolteachers’ lunch-room, the halls of Congress, city hall, or the local barbershop, peo-ple who love to be depressed about children today can always befound. You can go to lunch feeling perfectly happy, but after the dis-cussion turns to children today you will go back to work depressed. The willingness to be blue about a whole generation of children issymptomatic of a lack of respect for the individuality of each youngperson. The opposite attitude is faith and confidence about our chil-dren’s futures. None of us knows the future. To live is to constantlystep into the unknown. To step into the future with faith in the waythings will be is just as easy, or hard, as stepping into the future withfear and trepidation. Let’s recognize that the tendency to attack yourchildren when they move in a direction you don’t like is spurred onby the mud that you and your friends throw at the new generation. Talking with others about the supposedly nasty, worthless, andvalueless children today fuels your fears and your attacks on yourown children. If you are convinced that these comments are true,you will go after your children with the news that they are goingto be nasty, worthless losers. We see this same trashing of the younger generation’s ways inthe literature of every generation going back at least to the Greeks.In 399 BC the Greek city-state, Athens, put Socrates to deathbecause they thought he was responsible for the impiety of theyounger generation. We are not advocating that you ignore unacceptable behavior.If your child skips school, deal with it head-on. But handle it with-out trying to communicate to your child that your life and thechild’s life are in danger of being ruined by having the child turn Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 63

out like them—as if a child were a soufflé in danger of falling. Deal

with the child’s problems for what they are, not as signs of a forth-coming life as “one of them.” To avoid parenting anger, you must let go of your goal of con-trol. Instead, you can influence children’s behaviors by establishingcredibility as someone who expects the best of them. This does notmean ignoring unacceptable behaviors; but it does mean not try-ing to make the child subject to your anger. If you soak up com-munity views that “children are going to hell in a handbasket,”you will be constantly fearful about your own children, or perhapsworse, falsely proud of their purity.

When your children misbehave, you can take the attitude that:

This means children are on their way to degradation and should be told that you are frightened and distressed that they are headed there. or This means that children are on their way to being good people, but they need to be reminded you believe that is where they are even- tually headed, regardless of any misbehavior.

Punishing children with your fear and unhappiness about where

they are headed sets up a choice of letting your unhappiness rulethem so they become “good,” or asserting their own self-rule bybeing the bad person you forecast. Becoming the bad person that parents, teachers, and neighborsforecast is much more attractive to children than you might think.To become a person means to become an individual, distinct andrecognizable as different from others. This is a main goal of grow-ing up and of living one’s life. When adults offer children theopportunity to become distinct by being bad, there are powerfuldevelopmental forces that pull them in the direction of “sinful”64 The Anger Habit in Parenting

individuality and away from nameless, faceless “goodness.”

This is especially true if children have not yet developed any tal-ents that distinguish them in their own eyes and the eyes of adults.The choice can be seen by children to be between being somethingbad and being nothing—not being distinguishable at all. The desirable alternative to negative, fearful reactions to chil-dren’s misbehaviors is communication to the child that you expectdifferent behavior and that you will continue to expect it becausethe child will eventually achieve responsible adulthood. It willhelp you to believe in your children if you stay away from fear-mongering about children in general. Emphasizing the positive inschools, churches, and community centers may not be newswor-thy, but it feels good and gives you the strength to approach yourchildren with positive expectations. It needs to be repeated that approaching children with positiveexpectations does not mean excusing or in any way ignoring theirunacceptable behaviors. In fact, it makes the thorough examinationand, where possible, correction of misbehaviors more likely to hap-pen because it is more pleasant for you. Trying to frighten childrenfrightens you. Expecting your children to make amends where theycan and encouraging them to believe in themselves is more inviting.You will not want to ignore signs that they are in trouble. Your jobas a parent becomes expecting change, not communicating worry.Instead of being frightened by and ready to attack deviance in yourchildren, you will be hopeful and ready to show them that youexpect the best of them, even if they exhibit their worst.

Exercise 4-B: Identifying Ways to Become

Happier with Your Children

Try to think of two fears you have about how your children will Using Our Own Unhappiness to Control Children 65

grow up. Are these fears well-grounded, or are they just things thatyou hear as criticisms of “those children growing up today.” An example will help you get started:

Example 1: What Is Your Fear for Your Child?

I guess that it really makes me sweat when my children showdisrespect for adults. It’s embarrassing, so I guess this fits ideasabout the way children ought to be and the “no-good” childrentoday. I feel as if they are demonstrating to the public that they fitinto the category of good for nothing.How Might You Change Your Attitude? When I think about it, I really do expect they will eventually bemore respectful. This will be a big change for me, from worry tojust telling them what I expect. I don’t have to attack them. I canjust say, “I expect you to treat people with more respect as yougrow up. This is the way you might have responded.” I could eventell them that I will help them by always pointing out when theydisrespect someone and that I will expect them to change. I canfeel the fear leaving and I feel a lot better toward my children. Idon’t have to be unhappy with them about it.

One of the best things you can do for your children is to be happy.Think back to your own childhood. Were your parents happy? Ifso, wasn’t that a great source of strength for you? If not, wasn’t thata great source of distress? The place to start showing your children that you are happy isnot to allow their behavior to distress you. Show them that justbecause they need parenting (after all, they are going to make mis-takes, act badly, and so on) doesn’t mean that they will or canmake your life unhappy. That is why they need parents, becausethey are not yet responsible adults. But they will be. Making the changes recommended here would require lifechanges for most people. No one, except perhaps some saints,could be happy and have faith in their children at all times. We areplacing a signpost that says, “Improvement lies in this direction.”Do not put yourself in the position that imperfection as a parentmakes you a failure. Any improvement in your everyday happinesswith your children will repay you for having made the effort. Keeping track of change helps us change. You will benefit fromsetting aside four or five pages in your private notebook for record-ing successes in changing your attitude toward your children fromone of fear of their failures to hopeful expectations and communi-cation of those expectations. You need not become miserable inorder to parent effectively. Here is an example of how you might set up your notebook forkeeping track of successes.68 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Practice Record For Chapter 4

Example of Becoming More Happy as a Parent

Last night I went to pick up Ron from his junior play practice.It was supposed to be over at 9:00. I waited until 9:15 and no Ron.I went into the building and only the janitor was there. He saidthat practice let out early. I was frightened and angry. I didn’tknow what else to do, so I went home intending to call around toRon’s friends. He was there when I got home. He said, “We got out early and Sue gave me a ride. I thought I’dmake it before you left.” I felt a choice looming before me. I wanted to let him have itand make him feel my fear when I did not find him at school. Isaid to myself, “There is another way.” To Ron I said, “When youmake arrangements for me to pick you up, I expect you to be therejust as you would expect me to be there.” He said, “I didn’t think about it like that, Mom. Sorry.” I had a good evening. Chapter 5 Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger ToolPhilip maneuvers his bike expertly off the sidewalk and through thesandy corner park to save time. His featherweight mountain bikeflies easily up the small bank on the far side. Popping out of the parkand soaring into the air, he clears the sidewalk and curb on the streetnear his house. Now on the home stretch, he spots his father’s caralready in the driveway. He stops pedaling and the forbidden exple-tive, “Shit!” bursts out like the crack of a small caliber rifle. “Phil, where are you?” rings out from the open front windows asPhilip pulls into the drive. “I’m out here.” He carefully puts his most valued possession upon hooks in the garage. “I’m coming.”70 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Philip, head down, opens the door from the garage to the kitchen, and drags his body through to face the music. “I don’t know who you are these days, Phil,” his father says. “You agreed that you would take charge of cleaning and maintaining the pool if we got you that bike on your twelfth birthday. We used to be able to trust what you said. What’s going on? Are you on drugs or something? And look at me when I talk to you!” Phil raises his head, forcing his eyes to follow. “I’m not on drugs,” he manages to say. Then his body seems to collect itself to form a taller young man. “Is that what you think of me?” “I don’t know what to think of you. You seem lost, as if you’re somewhere else a lot of the time. You don’t seem happy around the house. You don’t do your chores. What should I think? You tell me.”

There are two very different possibilities for what is going on at

this time in Philip’s life. One is unavoidable in our culture becausewe start adulthood later than biology initiates it. Philip is entering puberty. His body is changing rapidly. Thismetamorphosis is biology’s way of forming an adult body. In manycultures in the history of humankind, Philip’s community wouldbe reviewing what he had learned and readying him for the cere-monies necessary for welcoming him into its full membership asan adult. But Philip’s family, school, and community are not evenclose to recognizing Philip as being either a biological adult or anadult member of the community. This is a normal, but treacher-ous, time for all families. We must be welcomed into a community in order to identifywho we are. Who we are, our identities, are formed from our rela-tionships. In order to identify himself as a real person, Philip musthave full membership in the community of real people. Philip’smembership status is unclear to him, and this confuses Philipabout who or what he is. Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 71

Why is Philip unclear about who he is?

The answer is connected to parental patterns of control andanger and is much more serious for all concerned than childrenbecoming confused about when they are adults.

In order to learn what it feels like to be an adult, children must

at some time be related to as if they are adults, by adults. This treatment tells children they are like those adults.

“People like me” is the basis of identifying who one is. These peo-ple react to children’s welfare in the same way they react to theirown welfare and expect the same from children. This is one’s moralcommunity, moral because treating others in the way one treatsoneself reveals an ethical attitude. Unfortunately, given the history of humankind and presentpractice, moral communities do not (yet) include all people. Peopleseen to be outside one’s moral community are not treated in thesame way as insiders. They are not viewed as real people. Theirhurts are not seen to be the same as those of insiders. They are dif-ferent and not to be thought about except as candidates for char-ity, and only then if they aren’t too demanding. Children must be welcomed into the moral community, thecommunity of “people like us,” or they will not know who they areor how to behave, and they will feel they are not real people. Perhaps you, as an adult, have not always experienced yourselfas an adult. “I still don’t know what I want to be when I growup,” is an adult joke, but a revealing one. “I don’t feel grown up,”is a common complaint of some adults. Feeling like a full-fledgedmember of the socially interdependent human community willonly occur if one is invited into the community and full mem-bership is conferred. If this did not happen when you were achild, others will easily manipulate your feelings of belonging72 The Anger Habit in Parenting

and rejection when you are a teen or an adult. The awful feelingof being on the outside will be lurking, ready to emerge, if othersignore or reject you.

Feeling outside the moral community is painful.

Parents and other authorities can easily use this painful outsideexperience to punish and control children. Banishment is an age-old punishment used in many cultures. Threat of banishment isthe tool that can be used for control. “If you keep it up, you will be just like those losers.” Translatedinto “child emotional talk,” this means, “You may be a person whodoesn’t belong.” Billions of dollars are spent by teens to ward offthe potential pain of not belonging. Adults spend many more bil-lions in order to try to validate their membership in the commu-nity of those who matter to them. Parents who use threats and anger to control children find iteasy to threaten exclusion from our community to punish children.Philip’s father said, “I don’t know who you are.” This is only hismost recent version of an alienating theme that goes back a longway in Philip’s life. Philip feels a terrible fear when he hears hisfather talk like this. His fear is that his father is questioning if he isreally one of them. His longstanding dread is that “I don’t belong.I am one of those whom my parents reject.” This practice forms thebasis for exclusionary practices by the culture such as prejudice. Families that practice prejudice toward any group of others runthe risk of disowning their own children. It is handy for parents toattack their children when they misbehave with the charge thatthe children will grown up to be “like those others.” Philip is used to hearing his parents disparage others, a widevariety of others. Lazy welfare bums, unethical Jews, demandingblacks, lazy neighbors with untrimmed yards, and women who Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 73

have careers and neglect their children are all equally unworthyhuman beings in his parents’ minds. All these and more have beenthe targets of snide remarks and occasional critical dissertationsfrom Philip’s parents. Philip has no question that his parentsexempt these groups from their expressions of ordinary sympathyand kindness, which they show even to a lost puppy. Outsidersdeserve anything that happens to them, and the last thing anyoneshould do is to help them. Philip’s parents’ angry attitudes were not lost on him as he grewup. It seems to him that sometimes his parents take for grantedthat he is a legitimate human being, just as they are. At other timesthey make it clear that he is nowhere near being someone theywould gladly call their own.

Philip’s welcome into his parents’ moral community,

the community of people they will treat like themselves, is never fully given to him or felt by him.

Philip’s identity as his parents’ child,

who will grow into someone like his parents, is always tentative.

Knowing who we are and belonging are two sides of the same coin.If Philip never knows for sure whether he belongs to the communityhe’s being reared in, even at the level of his family, then he also neverknows for sure who he is. He will soon become painfully aware thathis parents use keeping him on probation in order to control him. It’s like being asked to join a club, but never getting past proba-tionary status, because there is always something more to do for theclub to prove you really belong there. When Philip’s parents are upsetwith him, they give him something more to do in order to prove hedeserves their welcome into the community of selves who belong.74 The Anger Habit in Parenting

And there is always something more if what is required is

always doing what Philip’s parents want him to do. To effectivelycontrol him, Philip must always remain on probation. To granthim full membership in their community would be to relinquishthis tool of control.

Exercise 5-A: Using Exclusion to Show Anger

toward Your Children

Fear is the common motivator for parents who threaten their chil-dren with not belonging. Fear that turns into anger is a good clueto look for when you try to find out if you use exclusion tothreaten your children to control them. Philip came home late and hadn’t done a chore he promised todo. This awakened one of his father’s fears about his children. Thefather is highly judgmental of “worthless people.” He sees his jobof parenting as being vigilant for any deviance. Like a parent whobelieves illness lurks everywhere, threatening to make childrensick, Philip’s father believes children who grow up into worthlesspeople are everywhere. “Maybe Philip is really like one of thosepeople I think are worthless.” The father then turns his fear into an attack on Philip, whichtakes the form of “I don’t know who you are.” This means, “I don’tknow you as a member of this family.” Parental accusations such as “You’re a lazy bum. I don’t knowhow you will ever survive as an adult. You’re just like those worth-less…You’re going to be a…” communicate that you think yourchild doesn’t fit into your family. Attacks in the form of comparing the child’s “bad” behavior tothat of another child, particularly a sibling, function as exclusions.“Your sister was getting all As at your age. Why can’t you be like Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 75

her? I could always depend on your brother when…” are especially

exclusionary. They say, “X got in, but you didn’t.” Try to remember three times when you have excluded a child.Remember, if you examine what frightens you about your child’sfuture, you will often discover attacks that use exclusion as a weapon. These two examples will help you get started.

Example 1: The Incident

Mike’s third-grade teacher called our home one evening and toldmy wife that she caught Mike with a note from a girl in the class.The note asked him if he knew how they took temperatures in thehospital and asked him to meet her. Mike had scribbled okay on thenote. The teacher said she thought we ought to know about this.The Attack I do remember being mostly embarrassed to begin with. Ourolder children have done very well in that school and our family isrespected in the community. My embarrassment changed to anger,especially when my wife said, “You take care of it.” I didn’t really know what to take care of, but what I did do was toconfront Mike in his room. I asked him who this little girl was. I’mafraid I tried to give him the idea that there was something wrongwith her, that she is lower class and that no one was going to respecther. And then I said, “Is that the way you want to turn out? Insteadof being someone the teachers think highly of, like your brother andsister, do you want them to dismiss you as a loser?” This really got to Mike and he broke down crying. Since then, itseems as if he’s been kind of sad. He doesn’t approach me when Iget home. If I don’t seek him out, I don’t get to talk to him.

Example 2: The Incident

Sandy, our fourteen-year-old, was yelling at her little brotherone evening. She was really screaming at him, accusing him of76 The Anger Habit in Parenting

taking some money out of her room. It was so loud that I was surethat all the neighbors could hear her carrying on.The Attack I was afraid and embarrassed. I was afraid that the nice rela-tionship I had always hoped my family would have would just bekilled by Sandy’s extreme reaction to her brother. I felt the familywas about to fall apart. I was embarrassed by the thought that theneighbors were probably listening and thinking what a low-classbunch we are. I started in on Sandy with, “What kind of a person are you? Thisis your brother you’re screaming at. You’ve been parked up here inthis room by yourself doing what? I don’t recognize you any more.You act like some kind of creep who has no manners and no senseof what’s right and wrong.” She started to cry and I felt as if I’dgone too far. I tried to reach out for her, but she pulled away andshouted, “Get away from me!”

The Incident:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 77

The Attack:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Incident:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Attack:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________78 The Anger Habit in Parenting

The Incident:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Attack:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The family is the child’s first natural moral community, which,

by definition, consists of those whom we treat in the same man-ner as we treat ourselves. By the same definition, if our family isour only moral community, we will treat those outside the fam-ily in a different way. Literally, our moral attitude, our concernand regard toward others, will not extend to those outside thefamily in the same way as it does to those perceived to be in ourfamily. Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 79

We are more likely to be able to hurt and injure those whom we

see as outside than those whom we see as inside our moral commu-nity. Fraternities are able to haze even prospective (probationary)members viciously. Cliques are able to inflict lifelong injurioushumiliations on those unlucky souls who are found by them to beoutside. “Moral people” can direct lynchings, burnings, crucifixions,and even cannibalizations without guilt toward those outside theirkin, their clan, their religion, their tribe; namely, “their own kind.”

Excluding other persons from our own moral community releases

us, psychologically and morally (in our eyes), from concern for their welfare. Therefore, people who are “moral” in their interactions with their “own kind” can carry out terrible acts toward people they do not view as their own kind.

Children who are kept on probation as members of the family’s

moral community are in danger of being treated in the same wayas outsiders. Being on probation isn’t the same as meeting disap-proval from parents or others in the family. Those with solid cre-dentials in the family can be shown disapproval by other memberswithout threat of being put outside. It is only when the disapprovalcomes in the form of questioning the child’s status in the familythat probation, rather than full membership, is affirmed. “You arejust like X. You will never be someone I can depend on. You are justbad, that’s what you are.” Identifying a child as a “bad child” can mean to the parent thatthe child is outside the moral community. This allows the parentto hurt the child without recognizing the child’s distress. To the parent, attacking a child can be as natural as attacking“those people.” If the world has many people whom you con-demn—that is, if you have many prejudices—your children arelikely to experience a strong fear. Your children will fear that you80 The Anger Habit in Parenting

will use these same waste bins to discard them. When you disap-prove of groups of people, your children hear the message thatthese people are bad. When you disapprove of your children’sbehavior, they will easily hear the message that they are one of“those,” rather than one of “us.” The contrary is also true. If you talk inclusively about all people,your children will feel you welcome them into your moral com-munity. They will take it for granted that they will never be on pro-bation. If you disapprove of something they do, the disapprovaldoes not raise the issue of rejection. Your disapproval says, “I insistthat you act like this.” It does not say, “You are acting like some-one I reject as being unlike me.” Like it or not, we are all capable of cruelty toward others whenwe see them as not really being people. When we see others asobjects that do not have feelings, experience love, have ambitions,have families they love, and dream dreams, it gives us “moral” per-mission to treat them as we would a weed in the garden. When aparent attacks a child as being unlike and unworthy of being alegitimate member of humanity, the parent is likely to feel no hes-itation in mistreating the child. Once again we face the fact that if we are to reduce the use ofanger with children, we must change. It isn’t just a matter of learn-ing this or that technique or trick. We must change ourselves.Welcoming children into the family as a moral community—thatis, a group of people who feel each other’s pains and successes asthey do their own—requires that we recognize and minimize ourprejudices as much as we possibly can. Suppose you wish to calm and win the trust of a frightenedchild. While you are doing this, you frequently interrupt yourinterchange with shouts and putdowns of other people that hap-pen by. Do you think you could win the child’s trust this way?Trying to include a child in your family as a full-fledged member Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 81

while your child sees you emphasizing rejection and criticism of

others and demeaning those who displease you, results in a childwho does not know who he or she is, especially when you areshowing displeasure. One of the most telling areas for building your children’s confi-dence in being a person or being on probation as a person, is yourtreatment of your children’s friends. Making children’s friends wel-come as guests of the family reassures children.

Welcoming your children’s friends as legitimate guests

of the family reassures your children that they are legitimate members of the family.

The phrase “with all its rights and privileges” is included when col-lege degrees are granted to students. Part of being a member of afamily is to have some rights and privileges of membership.Granted, the rights are different for older children than younger,different for children than parents, but there should be rights for all. One of the most basic family rights is to choose friends who willbe respected by others in the family, at least until the person showshimself or herself to be dangerous or untrustworthy. The exclusionof friends because of skin color, name, family, grades, hair appear-ance, or clothing says to your children that only certain kinds ofpeople are legitimate like “us.” And your children are themselvessuspect for consorting with “one of them.”

Children go where they are welcomed, and those who welcome

them, at least to some extent, influence their identities.

It has been said, “It takes a village to raise a child.” We might addthat this is especially true if parents don’t raise them. It is true thatwhether or not children’s families welcome them into their moral82 The Anger Habit in Parenting

community, children will gravitate toward any group that will wel-come them. Churches, athletic teams, gangs, the family down thestreet all offer children “moral membership” and contribute tochildren’s identities. Even criminal groups must have some form ofmorals with respect to each other. Otherwise, their groups wouldself-destruct.

Exercise 5-B: Taking Your Children Off

Probation and Keeping Their Family Membership Active

The bottom line is to do everything you can to welcome your chil-

dren into the family and make their membership irrevocable. It isextremely important that when you become disapproving, or espe-cially when you become angry with your children, you maintainyour view of them as family members. If you start to lose this view,you will find yourself attacking your children with no sympathyfor the pain your attack is producing in them. It is particularly important to keep children feeling they arewelcome family members in blended families; that is, familieswith children from former marriages of both parents. Parentalsquabbling over equal treatment of the children is not onlyharmful to the children, it often becomes the source of seriousmarital problems. A good clue to use for detecting your children’s status is the wayyou feel about their anticipated discomfort when you show themyour disapproval. If their pain causes you discomfort, then you areviewing them as continuing to be inside your family. If you feeltheir pain as merely a satisfaction of your anger, then you have—at least temporarily—dumped them from membership in yourfamily as a moral community. Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 83

Try to remember two incidents when you felt bad for your childafter you disciplined him or her, but felt only anger or righteousindignation while you were carrying out the discipline. Two examples will help you see what to look for:

Example 1: The Incident

I found a plastic bag with stems and seeds in it under our fifteen-year-old boy’s mattress. I looked around and found a glass pipewith marijuana resin in the bowl stuffed back on the top shelf ofhis closet. When he came home I started yelling at him. I accusedhim of stealing because I knew he couldn’t afford to buy drugs. Itold him he could no longer be in contact with his friends becausethey were a bunch of potheads. I went on and on. He sat there withhis head down almost between his knees. While this was going onI felt nothing toward him except anger and betrayal.Your Feelings Later It took a long time for me to change my feelings. For days Iglared at him whenever he was around. I found him making hisown lunch one day. I usually make it for him. I said, “Good. You’dbetter learn to make sandwiches. That’s probably how you’ll endup making a living.” I began to come to and the things I had said to him started tostab me like knives. I realize now that I had done nothing to solvethe problem except practically disowning him.What Could You Have Done? I see now that I didn’t even know what he had done, who hewas doing it with, what he thought about it, or anything. Andnow we had zero communication. I could have decided to talk tohim about my lack of knowledge about what was happening andask him to help me out. I could have suggested that he invite hisfriends over and have a meeting where they shared what theirconcerns and beliefs were about drugs. I could have promised to84 The Anger Habit in Parenting

contribute nothing except questions and food. This feels much

more solid. Maybe it’s not too late.

Example 2: The Incident

Ruth came home from high school with a new friend. Thisfriend was wearing jeans with holes all over, patched with differ-ent kinds of material, including a big patch right in the crotch. Shehad rings all around her ears and on her eyebrows and nose. Icouldn’t stand to look at her. After she left, I asked Ruth in a reallysarcastic voice, “What the heck was that?” Ruth looked angry immediately and said, “She’s not a ‘that.’She’s a human being. She’s one of the coolest kids in my class ifyou want to know. But she probably doesn’t meet your standards.Maybe I don’t either.” This made me angry. I said, “Well, maybe you don’t.”Your Feelings Later I immediately felt terrible. I felt I had just thrown her out ofmy life.What Could You Have Done? That’s simple. All I had to do was to let Ruth tell me about thisgirl. She was already excited about a new friend. The fact that shebrought her home meant that she expected me to accept her.

The Incident:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Incident:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Keeping your children off probation as family members is one of the

most fundamental things you can do to influence their identities andtheir happiness as adults. A hundred years ago, when most peoplelived on farms and in rural areas, it was much easier and more natu-ral to welcome children into their families in a way that stabilizedtheir identities. Children hunger for chances to be like their parents. In the past, children worked together with their parents in farmfamilies, rejoicing when their parents gave them a chance to do a Withholding Family Inclusion as a Parental Anger Tool 87

task that was more adult. Each invitation from the parent was anaffirmation of the child’s status and identity as a member of thefamily. These opportunities are not available to most families today. Butoften families squander the chances that do remain to them towork with their children and offer their children the chance tohelp them do adult things. Working on the lawn or landscaping or remodeling or decision-making about these things are all opportunities to work with yourchildren. Often parents just assign their children to do certainchores and then leave them to it. This is okay to some extent. Buttry looking at every such assignment as an opportunity for you towork with your children. Do the yard work together. Ask your chil-dren what they think about plantings or how to accomplish someeffect. Every inclusive action you make with your children confersan identity as a member of a moral community on them.

Practice Record for Chapter 5

Writing down incidents that you are proud of is a great help in

making changes that really matter to you. Make room in your private notebook for recording three or fourincidents where you were able to recognize the danger signal thatyou were about to put your child on probation. In addition, leaveroom for recording at least three ideas you came up with to sharedecisions and tasks with your children. Here’s an example of a recorded incident that helped a child toidentify as a member of the family.88 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Date: 12/08Incident My wife and I were trying to decide whether to buy and fix upa rental house. We sometimes do this if we can see a way to dosome work ourselves and so increase the income potential of theproperty. We had gone round and round about this particularhouse, but we just couldn’t decide. Finally it occurred to me that we needed fresh eyes to look atthe house. Our sixteen-year-old daughter had listened to most ofwhat we talked about at home, but hadn’t said a word. I said to mywife, “Let’s drive Ann over there to take a look and see what shethinks.” We asked Ann, but she said she didn’t know anything and soon, yet she seemed pleased to be asked. After looking around theplace again with her and answering her questions, Ann said, “Youknow, one of my friends from school lives a couple of doors downfrom here. She told me she’s going to have to go to South Centralafter this year because they’re changing the district lines. SouthCentral is a good school, but it’s a long way away. She said that herparents, and a lot of others around here, are planning to move tokeep their children in North Central High or to get closer to SouthCentral.” My wife and I looked at each other and then hugged her. Mywife said to her on the way to the car, “Annie, you just saved us alot of money. How’d you like to stop for a burger?” Chapter 6 Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance

”He’s such an ingrate!” Jeb thunders at his wife. “We’ve given himeverything anyone could want. And God knows it cost us plenty.Many times we didn’t even have the money, but we still found a wayfor him to have the best clothes. Last year we got him a new carwhen he turned sixteen. Now I ask him to help me with the lawn andhe says he’s too busy. “Then he made that crack about his friend whose father hiresthe lawn work done. I swear, Kathy, I almost hit him. If I hadn’tturned and walked away, I think I would have. When I got in con-trol and told him he would have to help me with the lawn, hesulked. He moved around at about the speed of a caterpillar.Finally, I got sick of him and told him to go do what he had to do.He left without saying a word.”90 The Anger Habit in Parenting

“He’s just a kid, Jeb. He’ll thank us someday. Right now, he’s just too young to see what we’re doing for him. He expects it because we’ve always been there for him. Think what it was like for us growing up. Your parents didn’t even let you use their car, much less buy you one. We both had to work after school to have things we wanted. And then our parents made us use our money to buy our own clothes.” “You’re right, Kathy. One of my friends even had to pay rent at home. Can you imagine that today, a high-school kid paying rent to his parents? “But Kathy, I don’t know if I can stand his attitude any more. He seems to be getting snottier and snottier. He acts like he’s superior to us. My father would have landed me right on my behind if I had talked to him the way Junior talks to me. I’ve always said that I would never treat my children the way I was treated. But I swear one of these days I’m going to slap him silly.” Jeb’s prediction is likely to pan out. He is likely to lose it as Junior gets even more unpleasant, which he will.

Jeb’s parents’ generation would have diagnosed Junior as a spoiled

child. They used to tell Jeb and Kathy that they did too much fortheir son. Jeb didn’t listen because he thought it was mainly comingfrom their idea that children needed punishment, and lots of it. Jeband Kathy wanted to use love to rear their children. They lavished alot of care and concern on Junior, thinking that he would feel lovedby them in a way they didn’t feel loved while growing up. Unfortunately, despite all he’s been given, Junior doesn’t feelloved, he feels self-important. He feels that he is owed everythinghe wants. The feeling that others, particularly his parents, owe himleads him to more angry demands. Now the more he demands, themore fed up his parents become with him. Junior’s parents thought that they could build his self-esteemand self-confidence by assuring him that he is loved. They tried to Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance 91

make sure that he could depend on them when in need by reliev-

ing him of any form of distress. The result is not a child with good self-esteem. Instead, Juniorexpects his parents and others to keep him from distress and todeliver anything he desires. Junior’s parents have a high level ofanger and resentment at Junior because of his growing willingnessto use them. Angry parents of teenagers who are over the top in their demandsare common. These situations can easily get out of hand. They canlead to various tough-love solutions that are essentially abandon-ment of children who haven’t the psychological tools to survive.

Self-importance is made up of the persistent belief that others owe

it to you to solve your problems. It grows from the belief that you deserved what was actually given to you.

Self-esteem is made up of the persistent belief that you can find

your own solution to your problems. It grows with the belief that obstacles can be overcome.

Note that, as parents, we are there to solve the problems of our chil-dren when they are infants. This is natural and necessary. But bythe time our children are teenagers, we are not there to solve theirproblems. We are there to solidify their membership in the com-munity of people, “selves” if you will, that give, receive, trade forequal value, and love.

A parent’s anger at self-important teenagers arises because the

child acts as if the parent owes what the parent is giving out of (mistaken) love.92 The Anger Habit in Parenting

In order to reduce our children’s self-importance, we must change

our own behaviors. First, we must get over our anger at their self-important demands. Anger merely leaves self-important childrenfeeling that they have been cheated. They do feel that their par-ents owe them. When the parents angrily attack them, they reactas anyone would who is owed something. Instead of being paid,they are attacked by their debtor. In other words, they act verymuch as their parents are acting—angrily.

Exercise 6-A: Identifying Self-Importance

and Ignoring Its Demands

It is useful to be prepared beforehand for the self-important demands

of teenagers. A good way to prepare yourself is to develop a view ofthe child’s behavior that isn’t so personal. For example, imagine theself-important child as the naked king in the children’s story aboutthe king’s new clothes. Self-importance is the child’s new clothes. Itleaves self-important people naked because they have no command-ing position that justifies demands on their subjects. Another view is to imagine your unpleasant, demanding child asa diplomat who was out of the country when his or her governmentchanged. Upon return, the diplomat starts giving orders to otherswithout realizing he or she no longer has any status that justifies it. Do not use these views to belittle or mock your child. Use themonly for your own relief from angry responses. What is not takenpersonally isn’t as anger-provoking. Try to remember three instances during which you became veryangry with an older child because the child seemed ungrateful orexhibited an attitude of “you owe it to me.” Then imagine goingback to the instances with a more impersonal approach. Writedown your attitude changes and revise them until the heat fromthe incidents cools down. Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance 93

Two examples will help you get started.

Example 1: Incident Harold, our fourteen-year-old, started complaining about hisbasketball shoes. I asked him what was wrong with them. Hismother had gone with him at the beginning of the season and hepicked them out. They cost over a hundred dollars. Then two weekslater he’s complaining to me about them. He said they’re crap andthe other kids all had a different brand. I said no new sneakers, andhe got very agitated and yelled that I never give him anything exceptthe cheapest stuff. I got very angry and it escalated from there.Imagine an Impersonal Reaction I go through what happened in my imagination. Thinking of hischeapskate charge, I realize that’s where things went off track. I’malways a little hesitant to judge kids’ clothes and shoes these daysbecause I have no idea of what’s in and what’s not. I can see, though,that Harold really pulled one out of his you-know-what with thecheap remark. He could easily have explained to me what he knowsabout shoes instead of assuming he had the right to declare what heneeded to have. Ah, that’s the self-importance. I was willing to talk.He wanted only to order new shoes, and assumed he had the rightto do that. It is easy and helpful to imagine him as a petty tyrantwho doesn’t know he has no right to make such demands.Is Your Anger Now Reduced When You Think of the Incident? Very much so. I think I’ll be more prepared to deal with Harold’slittle exercises in “the right of kings.” I will need to remember notto ridicule him and to use my king thoughts to reduce my angerand make his demands more impersonal.Try Again If Heat Is Still Present I’m fine. In fact, I’m looking forward to interacting differentlywith Harold.94 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Example 2: Incident Penny didn’t want to baby-sit her eight-year-old brother whileher mother and I went to a movie. She argued that she had betterthings to do, but I persisted. Then Penny said, “Why should Ibaby-sit him? He’s your kid, not mine. Why am I the one who hasto take care of him?” I blew up. I felt she didn’t have an ounce of gratitude in herbody. Everyone in the family caters to her demands. Her brotherleaves the living room when she has friends over. We get her every-thing. Yet, she pulls this, “He’s not my kid.”Imagine an Impersonal Reaction When I imagine Penny as someone who thinks she’s a queen,but everyone else sees she’s not, my anger turns to feelings of sor-row for her. It seems she is a lot more alone than she thinks she is.In another way, the reality of it, she has more people who love herthan she knows.Is Your Anger Now Reduced When You Think of the Incident? Yes indeed. I must think hard now about what to do.Try Again If Heat Is Still Present Thinking of Penny as a “queen without portfolio” is quite enough.

You will find it helpful in dealing with teenage self-important

children to stop servicing your teenage children’s wants as if they were needs. You may need to examine your own views on needs in order to get your treatment of a teenager clear.98 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Do you mix your own wants and needs? Is it a catastrophe for youif you can’t afford the house you want or the automobile youwant? Are these the same as not having any house or any means oftransportation? Do you tell your wife that men need sex? Is it acatastrophe for you if she doesn’t comply with your “need”? Closer to home, do your child’s low grades, lack of success insports, poor reputation, or questionable college admission cause acatastrophe for you? Are these things on the same level of impor-tance as your child’s health, family relationships, and long-termfriendships? If you confuse your wants with your needs, then you will con-fuse your children’s wants with their needs. The pain you feelwhen your children are unhappy because they don’t have the lat-est designer jeans will be the same pain you feel when you seethem suffering from an injury or illness. Yet when your childrenexhibit demands instead of tears, you may feel used and becomeangry. Your anger, which occurs when children take for granted thattheir “needs” require you to give them what they want, arisesbecause of how the demands are made. Instead of crying for whatthey want, they come right out and demand what they want. Try to see the issue of teenage demands in the light of needs ver-sus wants, instead of demands versus being nice about it. Everyoneis entitled to demand what is owed to them. The problem isn’t thedemand. It is that self-important children aren’t owed what theythink they are owed. You may need to work on how you respond to your own disap-pointments before you are able to treat your children’s disap-pointments in a more helpful way. Do you cry inside for what you want? Are you sure that what you cry for is really needed? Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance 99

Exercise 6-B: Seeing the Difference between

Not Getting What We Want and Not Getting What We Need

We need things that are necessary for a reasonably healthy and

happy life. Those things we want are not necessary for life. Theyare at most things that would be nice to have. Not getting what we need naturally lends a sense of urgency totrying to get it. If we have no food, we naturally put all our effortsinto getting some food. If we aren’t successful, we naturallybecome emotional and fearful. Not getting what we want, say ice cream, does not necessarilyextend to further efforts to get it. If we experience a sense ofurgency when we don’t get what we want, it is because we are mis-taking what we want for what we need. When we don’t make thedistinction between need and want, we may get very emotional,even fearful, about not getting what we want. Therefore, it is a bad idea to try to distinguish between what youwant and what you need by noting how you feel about not gettingsomething. You must think it through to determine whether some-thing is needed or merely wanted. Try to think of three things you have gotten upset about not get-ting that you actually only wanted, but didn’t need. An example will help get you started.

Example: What Didn’t You Get That Upset You?

I was on my way back from a business trip and the last leg of myflight was cancelled by the airline. It really upset me that I didn’tget home to relax and see the kids before their bedtime.Did You Need It or Just Want It? Obviously I didn’t die from getting home late, so I guess I only100 The Anger Habit in Parenting

wanted to get home on time. Actually, when I think about my

anger with airlines, I guess it’s all about want. When I think aboutit like that my anger cools off.

What Didn’t You Get That Upset You?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________102 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Dealing with nasty and demanding behavior exhibited by your

teenagers requires that: 1. You do not attack them angrily. Your anger will only confirm to them that you really do owe them what they want, but just don’t want to pay. 2. You are clear on the distinction between need and want. If your children’s unhappiness about not getting what they want doesn’t make you unhappy, then you will be less likely to give them things just because they want them. You will be calm in refusing them. They in turn will lose their self- important, demanding behavior.

Parental anger and teenage self-importance are connected to the

essential topic of interpersonal love. When we are self-important,we are unable to understand or feel gratitude. Because we viewwhat is given to us as having been owed to us, we never experi-ence a gift as being given freely. Love is the core of freely choos-ing to give to others. If we don’t recognize what is given to us byanother as being freely given, then we cannot feel or understandthat they love us. Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance 103

Instead, the meaning of love for self-important people is desire.

“I love you” translates into “I want you”

or “I want what you can give me” for self-important teenagers.

Junior, who began our chapter by precipitating an outburst from

his father by exhibiting his self-importance, doesn’t understandthat he naturally has the capacity to give freely and to loveunselfishly. He will need to be taught this. Junior is confused about what is given to him and what is owedto him as an adolescent. Part of normal human development is tolearn the role of love in human relationships. It is necessary to dis-tinguish what is given and what is owed and what is done for self-ish reasons. Because Junior doesn’t understand anything exceptselfishness as a motivator of people’s behaviors, he doesn’t recog-nize either the gifts given to him or the gifts he gives to others. Unfortunately, the more children or adults are told that theyshouldn’t be selfish and they should give freely to others, the morethis requirement confirms to them that they are not capable ofgiving to others freely. Their view is that taking is natural to themand giving requires doing something that is contrary to their nat-ural inclinations. Virtue becomes doing what you don’t reallywant to do. Junior doesn’t need to learn loving as a duty. He needs his par-ents or other significant adults to recognize his natural inclinationfor unselfishness and a giving form of love. Junior doesn’t recognize his concern and all-night vigil over hissick puppy as love. He thinks his emotions were just concern overhis property. His parents can help him see that this isn’t true. Heloved his dog. He doesn’t recognize his concern and worry over his mother’shealth a few years ago as love. Junior thinks it was fear of losing104 The Anger Habit in Parenting

her. His father can point out that his reaction was the result of hisloving concern for his mother and thank him for it. Junior doesn’t recognize that his emotional response to a sadlove song is due to his grief over another’s loss, even an imaginaryother. He thinks music just does that to him. His teachers canpoint out to him that his sadness comes from his tender concernfor others’ hurts. It is the welcome that his parents and other significant adultsgive him into a moral community that will teach Junior that manyof his feelings are moral; that is, they are selfless and caring. Hewill learn that other members of the moral community care aboutand love him. He will find that saying “thank you” can be heart-felt. Junior’s later professions of love to a young woman will beexpressions of tender caring for her as a whole person instead ofmerely a way of saying he wants her and wants what she has tooffer him. Much good can come from parents who learn to give up theiranger toward their self-important children and teach them theyare capable of love.

Practice Record for Chapter 6

Make room in your private notebook for recording some successes

at substituting concern for your children’s needs with concern fortheir wants. You may also wish to record a few instances where youspotted the opportunity to relate to your children’s caring concerntoward others and you were able to show appreciation to them fortheir unselfishness. An example will help you lay out your record. Parental Anger and Childhood Self-Importance 105

Date: 11/04Example of Handling Julie’s Self-Importance Julie got very snippy with me about her hair. She said no onearound here knows how to cut and style hair and she had to go tothis hairdresser her rich friend goes to in the city. As I started to getangry at her demanding attitude and the “I’m too good to go some-where here” message, I caught myself. I thought, “Let’s just staywith the basics here. Does she need to do this or does she just wantto.” Clearly, her health and welfare weren’t at stake. So, forget therest of it. I began to see some humor in the way she was going on.Finally, I just smiled and said, “I’m interested in your friend. Tellme about her.” She was sullen at first, but in a short time she wastalking about how she felt about this girl. Julie was unsure shereally knew why the girl was friendly, and she was a bit uneasyabout all her talk about money. We had a good talk. I realized Icould help Julie distinguish between her wants and needs. Chapter 7 From Caring to Emotional Deception– A Slippery SlopeJoey races his tricycle across the driveway. Hitting the gully thatforms the edging of the manicured drive, his tricycle front wheelwrenches to a ninety-degree angle. As the back of the trike flies up,Joey is launched, head-first, onto the lawn. John watches his three-year-old, first with concern and then withfear, all within two seconds. He rushes to Joey’s side as the boystarts to cry. After examining him carefully and finding only a scrapeon his face, John’s mood quickly changes from fear to anger. “What did you think you were doing?” John yells. As Joey continues to cry, John goes on in a loud voice, “Wereyou trying to break your neck? You could have hurt yourself badly.108 The Anger Habit in Parenting

I’m going to take your tricycle away if you can’t keep it on the drive- way. You scared the heck out of me.” As Joey screams, John carries him into the house and to his room. “Now you stay in here until I tell you you can come out. And stop your bawling. You’re not hurt.”

Parents’ feelings often change from concern and caring to anger

and disapproval when their children are endangered. A mother,who is frightened when her daughter isn’t home on time, verballyattacks the daughter viciously when she finally shows up. Thefather panics and even weeps when his toddler disappears at themall, and then yells at the child angrily when he’s found. Why does this happen? Consider what is involved in keeping children safe as they growup. Infants require that we physically move them about and feedthem several times a day. Their safety and comfort are entirely in ourhands—literally “our hands.” Their care is entirely under our control.

Caring for infants requires that we control

their surroundings and their bodies.

As infants develop into toddlers, they move about, first crawling,

and then walking. They do not yet know what is good for themand what is dangerous. So we must exert even more control overthem and their environment. The control also becomes more difficult. Children start to avoidour attempts to control them. They resist and protest our controlattempts, which are necessary for their care and well-being.

Toddlers require the exertion of additional control from us because

of their increasing mobility and their attempts to resist our control. From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 109

Things change even more as children begin to learn language. A

big change is our attempts to care for their safety and well-beingthrough talking instead of direct physical intervention. We say“no” instead of picking them up when they are in danger ofpulling over the lamp. Instead of checking their diapers, we askthem to go potty. It is difficult to explain to a two-year-old the reasons for them todo as we ask. It is often easier to show emotions—fear, anger, andlove—in order to influence their behavior than it is to patientlyexplain the reasons to them. It is easy to forget that if language is to be used to impart infor-mation, it must be used carefully. It is easier to impart emotionthan information to young children.

We attempt to care for the safety and welfare of older toddlers

by using language to communicate emotions.

As we learn to control children by raising our voices, criticizing them

in an angry way, and saying things that are meant to frighten them,our communication with children is reduced and the child increas-ingly listens to our talk for signs of emotion rather than information. In summary, we start out caring for our children by exercisingcomplete control over where they are and what they are exposedto. Keeping them safe and happy seems to require more control asthey grow. Our caring efforts meet active opposition from our chil-dren as they acquire language, which tends to require an increasein our controlling efforts.

Speaking louder, making threats, and intimidating

with physical advantage come naturally in struggles for control in parents and children.110 The Anger Habit in Parenting

As caring for the safety, welfare, and happiness of children meets

opposition from them, a control struggle develops, involvingyelling, threats, and worse. This is how caring for children can turninto verbally attacking them. John’s anger with Joey for hurting himself, a seeming paradox,means that John’s way of caring for Joey has turned into elicitingfear in Joey. John does this by attacking Joey verbally. For John, asfor many parents, care and concern turns into the habit of con-trolling by using angry and threatening language. It is not news to most parents that they yell at their childrenbecause they love them. What they may not understand is thattheir verbal attacks, which they use as a way to control children,make it more difficult for them to actually talk to their childrenabout real dangers. Once they start down the slippery slope fromloving care to emotional language used to control their lovedones, language loses its information value. The biggest loss is theability to communicate realistic fear over what they are doing ormight do. If you frighten your children with emotional language in orderto control them, your emotional credibility for real dangers will belost. Sooner or later your children will discount your emotionalityaltogether. As Joey gets beyond the tricycle age he will need to avoid thingsthat are much more dangerous than the driveway edging. John willbecome angry and emotional about Joey’s learning to drive, hisgrades, smoking marijuana, having sex, and being home on time. Joey will take for granted that when his father tells him aboutthese dangers, his father is trying to control his life. John’s lov-ing care for his son and his desire to keep him safe will have goneoff track. From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 111

Exercise 7-A: Being Emotionally Truthful

with Children

Overreacting in order to get children to do what you want them to

do is to tell them an emotional lie. If your children emotionallyupset you to the same degree when they are about to touch some-thing on the coffee table as they do when they are about to toucha hot stove burner, then your emotions are deceiving both you andyour children. Chances are you aren’t reacting to their touchingsomething on the coffee table. You are reacting to them not doingwhat you tell them to do. You may be thinking, “Of course I want them to do what I say.”But stop and consider for a moment. If you use the emotion ofalarm to rule your children, what will you use to tell them aboutthings that actually are alarming that they need to avoid? How willthey be able to tell whether you’re crying wolf or there is, in fact,a dangerous wolf? If you use alarm for control, the chances are that you use thesame emotional deceptions to control yourself. Correcting thismistake is at the heart of the new cognitive therapies—stop ringingalarm bells and depression bells with your self-talk. In other words,stop deceiving yourself with your emotions. But this discussion is about rearing children. A good approachto trying to detect and stop this practice is to see that you aredeceiving children about how serious their behaviors are. Whenyou are emotional with your children, learn to ask yourself, “Is thisas serious as my emotionality is saying it is?” This judgment presents a problem if you are used to gauging theseriousness of something by how intense your feelings are. Then itis particularly helpful for you to see that you may be letting youremotionality make your decisions for you and to stop doing this.112 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Is it really the case that because your excitement is very high

both when your college team wins the championship and whenyou get a new job, that these two events are equally important?The key to seeing the difference is to ask, “What will this mean forthose I love and value tomorrow, next week, five years from now?” The same question is relevant for judging whether your emo-tions are misleading your child. “What difference will this make tomy child’s life in the long run?” Try to remember three times when you got very emotional aboutsomething your child did and you communicated your emotion tothe child. Was the event as serious as your emotion indicated? Two examples will help you get started.

Example 1: The Emotional Incident

Our son backed the family car into the basketball pole in thedriveway. He broke a taillight, did what turned out to be $600worth of damage to the car, and broke the basketball pole. I did getvery emotional when his mother told me about it on the phone. Iwas still hot when I got home. I told him he was careless like healways is. He couldn’t be trusted. I was yelling at him. He said hewould pay for the damage. I told him that wasn’t the point. It wasthe careless attitude that he always has that worried me. He couldnever be trusted by anyone to do something carefully.What Difference Will This Make to My Child’s Life in theLong Run? Backing into the basketball pole is an unimportant thing in theend. Being a careful driver is much more important. I need to ridewith him more and see how careful he really is and see if he needsinstruction. Maybe we could talk about it if I stay calm.Was This as Serious as My Emotionality Was Indicating? Clearly it wasn’t, as I realized when I calmed down. I neverthought blowing up at my son was a way of lying. I guess it really From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 113

is. I was acting as if it were a criminal offense, which is far from thecase. My son is usually responsible. He doesn’t always put my toolsback, which irritates me. But then, I don’t always put them backright away either.

Example 2: The Emotional Incident

We are trying to toilet train Cathy, who just turned two. I’m sotired of changing dirty diapers I could scream. The other day, justafter I had put her training pants on, she had a bowel movement. Iscreamed at her, “Why did you do that?” I was mad, but I must sayI laid it on a bit. She started crying and I said, “You better cry. That’sall you can do is cry!” By the time I had cleaned her up, I was won-dering if I had really done the right thing. Now I see what I did. Iled her to believe something that isn’t true; that what she had donewas earth-shattering. And I did this to make her feel bad and tomake her change her behavior.What Difference Will This Make to My Child’s Life in theLong Run? I imagine she will be toilet trained before she goes to college. Butseriously, when she is toilet trained will just be a statistic years fromnow.Was This as Serious as My Emotionality Was Indicating? By no means. I made it out to be so serious in order to punishCathy. But I see that I, in an important sense, lied to her. Myactions and emotions told her that what she had done was horri-ble. That’s not true.

1. The Emotional Incident:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________114 The Anger Habit in Parenting

What Difference Will This Make to My Child’s Life in the

Long Run?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What Difference Will This Make to My Child’s Life in the

Long Run?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Was This as Serious as My Emotionality Was Indicating?

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________116 The Anger Habit in Parenting

It is important to remember that our attempts to make children

feel bad by exaggerating the seriousness of their transgressionsbegins with a loving and caring concern for them. When we slidedown the slippery slope from caring to attempts to control chil-dren by emotional storm, we ourselves tend to get lost in thatstorm. Screaming at children who make a mess in an attempt to makethem feel terrible so that they will not make messes draws us intoa psychological place where our children’s messes bother us morethan ever. A vicious circle develops that makes us even more con-cerned and emotional with our children, who repeat these awfulthings—things that were made awful by our original emotionalexaggerations that were meant to stop them. “Awful things will happen to you if you continue to come homelate” becomes “He’s late. Something terrible is happening to him.”The demons we summon to frighten our children will often visitus at three in the morning. What started out to be discipline motivated by love ends upbeing a frightening emotional trap. The more we can get back to aconscious caring love for our children and away from consciousfears for our children, the more calm, honest, and helpful our dis-cipline of them will be. Joey’s tricycle accident at the beginning of the chapter was achance for John to carry out the job he has as Joey’s father. Like aresident doctor answering a page, that’s what he’s there for. If thereare no medical crises, then there is no need for resident doctors. Ifchildren don’t need help, then there is no need for parents. From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 117

For John to carry on as if he’s shocked that Joey needs help

means John has forgotten his basic feelings—loving care for Joey.Like the doctor who is shocked and angry by being paged, John hasforgotten why he’s there.

Getting back to the basics of our caring feelings toward

our children means converting our fears about the futures of our children into faith in their futures.

Stop a moment and consider the difference between fear of the

future and faith in the future. The future hasn’t happened yet, so wecan just as well be hopeful as fearful about what will happen. If weare headed in a bad direction and need to change, fear only dis-tracts us from changing direction. Faith that we will change direc-tions when circumstances change helps us to have the courage tomake the change. It’s the difference between, “Yes you can, yes youcan,” and “Oh my God, you’re going to crash.” If he had remembered his loving care for Joey, John might wellhave simply reassured Joey about riding on the driveway. He mighthave told him, “You’ll learn to be more careful as you get moreexperience. I’m glad you’re not badly hurt—just some scrapes.”

Exercise 7-B: Replacing Fearmongering

with Caring Confidence

Most parents have concerns for their children. Look at your con-cerns about your children. Some are no doubt just that, concernsthat come from the everyday facts of life. The meaning of a child’shigh temperature, the safety of a daughter on a college campus, theoutcome of a blood test for a serious disease, are possible threats toyour children’s health and welfare.118 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Other concerns and fears are left over from emotional warn-ings you have used to try to get them to do what you thinkwould be best for them. Getting into college, getting into theright college, doing well in a game, doing well in anything—thesedo not warrant fear. They might be your goals for your children.They might be your children’s goals. But they are hopes for thefuture. Once made into fearful concerns, they will depress bothyou and your children instead of inspiring them to have positiveviews of the future. Try to identify two fears you have for a child that might haveoriginated in your attempts to make your child do something byfearmongering, by scaring your child about failing to do what youwant. An example will help you get started.

Example: Describe a Fear Concerning a Child

June gets almost-failing grades in junior high. I’m scared todeath that she will end up dropping out and having a child by thetime she’s sixteen. I lose a lot of sleep over her.Have You Ever Tried to Make Your Child Have that Same Fear? Yes, of course. That’s just it. She doesn’t seem to care about whatwill happen if she doesn’t study and drops out. She makes me wantto throttle her.Imagine Talking to Your Child about the Issue WithoutTrying to Raise Fear: Okay, you want me to talk to her about hopes rather thanfears. I could say, “June, I’ve been thinking that I don’t reallyknow how you see your future. I suspect I’ve been scaring youwith bad things I say are going to happen to you. I don’t thinkthat’s fair. I don’t know any more than you about your future.I’d love to share your dreams and hopes with you and maybe tellyou the confidence I have in you. I know you don’t think I have From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 119

confidence in you because I’m always getting on you with terri-

ble forecasts about what will happen to you. But I’m going tostop that. It isn’t good for either of us. Let’s see what we candream up.”

Have You Ever Tried to Make Your Child Have that Same Fear?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________120 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Have You Ever Tried to Make Your Child Have that Same Fear?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 121

Imagine Talking to Your Child about the Issue Without Trying

to Raise Fear:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It is clear that in order to maintain emotional honesty with our

children, we must be honest with ourselves about our fears andconcerns. Exaggeration of dangers brings mistrust from our chil-dren and gut-wrenching fear to us. Change in this area brings adouble win. As we become better at keeping our emotions in perspective,they will remain in perspective in our emotional lives, and our chil-dren will take into account our concerns. For example, if we talk tothem more calmly about the various outcomes that people experi-ence when they use marijuana, they can hear us and consider theactual consequences that we are concerned about. Many people wonder why a counselor—a stranger—can estab-lish communication with teenagers when the parents who livewith them sometimes can’t say a word without starting a fight. Abig part of the answer is that counselors don’t get scared, angry,and crazy acting, no matter what teenagers reveal. If counselorsshow concern, amusement, or incredulity, teenagers know this isthe counselor’s reaction to what they are saying. The interactionstays on an honest emotional level. Parents can just as easily adoptthe same way of interacting with their children. Even better, when we calm down, we can again experience ourmore subtle and important feelings. Our tender feelings, the feel-ings that were there when we saw our children’s smiles as we122 The Anger Habit in Parenting

picked them up from school, speak softly. The amplified screaming

of our fears and anger drown out the tender love that gives ourlives meaning.

Practice Record for Chapter 7

Going down a calmer path requires lots of practice. As with the

other changes suggested here, it is helpful to record some of oursuccesses in making real changes. As you begin to see that your love and concern for your chil-dren doesn’t need to lead to exaggerated emotional reactions, yourchildren will be confused at first. They expect you to be all bentout of shape. As they see a difference in you, they will also change.They will stop running away either physically or emotionally.These successes will help sustain you. Leave three or four pages in your private notebook for thisrecord. Here is an example that may help you see what to change andhow to record your success in becoming more emotionally honestwith your children.

Date: 12/10Success in Bringing Bobby Closer I’ve been trying to stay calm with Bobby for three weeks now.When he came home late for dinner, I calmly said something like:“I’m happy to see you’re safe. I need to remind you that I expect youto be home on time, so come home right from school tomorrowinstead of going to your friends’ house. I’ll come home early and bewaiting for you. I saved some dinner for you. Let’s sit in the kitchen.I’ve been meaning to ask you about what you think of your team’sprospects next year.” He looked at me as if to say, “Who is this!?” From Caring to Emotional Deception—A Slippery Slope 123

I sat at the kitchen table while Bobby set his place and heatedup his dinner. He sat down. After a bit he actually started talkingabout the team. He went down through his teammates, one byone, telling me what he thought. He sounded like an experiencedcoach. I never knew he was that knowledgeable about basketball. Ismiled all night, probably even in my sleep. Chapter 8 Children’sAttention, TV, and Parents’ Anger

Jake calls to his five-year-old son, “Time to turn off the TV and cometo dinner.” Mickey starts to get up. But just then the bad dinosaurshows up with a roar. Mickey pauses to see what will happen. A fewseconds later Mickey has forgotten that he was going out to thekitchen to eat dinner. Suddenly the TV screen goes blank and his father’s angry faceappears in front of it in place of the monster. Simultaneously, thedinosaur’s roar becomes his father’s shout. Mickey freezes.Gradually he distinguishes the words, “Come to dinner.” During dinner Mickey’s mother looks at him, then back to Jakeand says, “His kindergarten teacher called. He’s really disrupting theclass.” Mickey is examining the tablecloth. Jake asks, “What’s goingon at school, Mickey?”126 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Mickey picks his plate up and looks under it.

“What on earth are you doing, Mickey?” “Look at the lines the plates make on the tablecloth,” Mickey says. Pauline, Mickey’s mother, raises her voice. “For heaven’s sake, put your plate down. Do you want some catsup on your meatloaf?” Mickey replaces his plate. His little sister asks her mother for more milk. Mickey makes a face at her. His father yells, “Stop that. Now answer your mother.” Mickey looks puzzled and remains quiet for a few seconds. Then he picks his plate up again and looks under it. Jake yells, “I’ve had enough of this. Get out of my sight. Go to your room—now!” Mickey makes it as far as the stairs. There he spots a toy he hasn’t seen in a while. He sits down and picks the toy up. Ten seconds later, he goes over to the TV and turns it on. His parents hear the TV, and Jake jumps up saying, “I’ll teach that kid something.” Pauline says, “Jake, calm down! Don’t hit him.”

What is this all about? Why do some children seem to their par-ents and teachers as if their attention is everywhere except wheretheir parents think it should be? Control of attention comes from two directions—changesoccurring around us and behaviors in which we are engaged.Sometimes attention follows movements, sounds, or otherchanges made near us. A flashing light, someone entering theroom, a sound that is different than usual can draw our attention.

Some of our attention is controlled by changes around us.

Some of our attention is controlled by what we are trying to do. Children’s Attention, TV, and Parents’ Anger 127

Sometimes our attention is directed by behaviors in which we are

engaged. If we are reading a book our attention stays with thewords on a page, and we change our eye direction in a regular man-ner that is influenced by what we gather is written on the page. Ifa child is playing hopscotch, attention is being regulated by manyinternal events that monitor body position along with the child’sexpectation of what must come next. Roughly speaking, attention is controlled by things going onoutside us and things going on inside us. Pause and think for a minute about this simple conclusion. If ourattention can be affected by changing events around us, as well asbeing guided by what we are doing, aren’t there going to be con-flicts? For example, if you are teeing off and someone says some-thing, your attention to your golf swing is likely to be ruined. So wehave golf manners to prevent the diversion of the golfer’s attentionduring a shot. (There are few such manners in most other sports.) But most things are not done in a quiet, unchanging place. Wemight be reading, but people are talking, the wind is blowing, andmaybe there is music in the distance. Furthermore, every time wechange our eye direction on the page, the whole picture on ourretinas swims into a different picture (think of moving a cameraduring a long exposure). Nature has solved these problems for us to some degree. Whenwe are engaged in a task that requires us to move our attentionfrom one thing to the next to the next, our perceptual systems tendto suppress changes going on around us. When our eyes movequickly from one position to another, our perceptual systems shutoff vision, so that the blurry movement of our retinal picture is notseen. While we are trying to solve a problem, we are not apt to hearwhat is going on around us.128 The Anger Habit in Parenting

While we are working on a task,

our surroundings are less able to demand our attention.

Because our attention to our surroundings is suppressed while we

are performing tasks, we are more able to complete tasks withoutbeing distracted along the way. We set out to pay our bills and areable to complete the task even though a bird starts to sing, a con-versation is going on in the next room, or a squirrel makes noiseon the roof. We stick to what we started out to do. But we have all experienced times when we start to do some-thing and get derailed along the way.

Exercise 8-A: Understanding Attention

Distraction

Before learning what you can do about helping children stay on

task, it will be helpful for you to spot what’s happening when achild gets derailed from one activity to another. You are less likelyto react with anger and more likely to look for other solutions tothis problem if you can identify with what children are experiencing. Try to remember two occasions where you started to do onething and got distracted along the way. We are not referring toinstances where you change your mind. Starting out to wash thecar and deciding, while backing out of the garage, to go get gasinstead, is not what we’re talking about. In fact, if you think thismind changing is what children do when they are easily dis-tracted, it increases the likelihood that you will become angry withthem. You will treat the problem as if it’s just a case of “He wouldrather look at impressions in the tablecloth than eat.” Try to think of occasions where you started to do one thing andunthinkingly ended up doing, or starting to do, something else. Children’s Attention, TV, and Parents’ Anger 129

An example may help you remember and get you started.

Example 1:What Happened? I went to the library with the intention of looking for a novel afriend had recommended. On my way past the new nonfiction sec-tion, I noticed a book on parenting. An hour later I was back in thecar with two books on family problems. Only then did it occur tome that I had gone to the library for something else. I had to thinkback and reconstruct my thoughts to remember what it was.Did You Do This Intentionally? Once I picked up and started reading the parenting book, myinterest went in that direction. Then another book caught my eyeand so on. I entirely lost track of why I’d come to the library.

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________130 The Anger Habit in Parenting

What Happened?______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mickey, in the example that began this chapter, starts to get up fromthe TV and go to dinner. This simple task, moving to the kitchen, isderailed by something that caught his attention on the TV. Lines onthe tablecloth distract him from eating. His sister distracts him fromanswering his mother. A toy distracts him from completing the tripto his room. One can imagine what he’s like in a classroom. These derailments of some children’s behaviors by any stimulusthat happens by are often breeding grounds for parental anger.Parents can do two important things about this problem to helpchildren concentrate and help themselves stay away from escalatinganger. These are: 1. Limit children’s access to passive entertainment such as TV, computer games, and spectator activities. 2. Learn to repeat directions calmly to children and wait for their responses. Parental anger is exactly the opposite of being helpful withattention problems, as we will see when we discuss item two above;that is, giving calm directions. First, why should children have limited access to passiveentertainment? Pause a moment and imagine yourself to be the writer anddesigner of children’s TV or of children’s computer games.Wouldn’t your first priority be to find ways to capture children’sattention and keep it? “Good” programming does exactly that.And after the accumulation of three generations’ worth of writingand producing experience, there are people who are exceptionallygood at keeping children’s attention. Now imagine hundreds and thousands of hours of programexposure for young children, who are just learning to do a thou-sand things that require guiding their own attention while per-forming tasks. Putting away toys, learning table manners,formulating an account of what their days have been like, and even132 The Anger Habit in Parenting

putting on clothes properly, all require some suppression of atten-

tion to events that could derail them. While trying to learn thesethings a few minutes at a time, children spend hours doing some-thing that guides their attention with no effort on their part.

Passive entertainment such as TV requires

no self-regulation of attention by children.

TV is expertly designed to guide

children’s attention with outside cues.

Children such as Mickey are trained several hours a day to let

events in front of them guide their attention. Mickey is very goodat letting his attention be guided by what’s happening in front ofhim by the time he is five. This skill is in exact opposition toMickey’s attempts to carry out a task—any task. Even Mickey’s abil-ity to do such a simple thing as walk from one room to anotherand make it all the way to his goal requires that control of hisattention come from him. As it is, he often does not make it eventhrough simple tasks. He orients toward everything that he goespast, and something along the way often snares him. Imagine that your world was completely arranged for severalhours a day by a benefactor who continually monitored your bore-dom and anticipated what would be of interest to you. All youwould need to do is ride along. You need not try to carry throughon any plan or guide your attention in any way. Each day whenthis treatment stopped, you would be left to your own resources.Don’t you think you might tend to respond to any event thatcame along? And, conversely, don’t you think you might havesome difficulty learning to govern your own attention? You may wonder, “What about reading? Don’t books guide chil-dren’s attention in the same way that TV does?” Children’s Attention, TV, and Parents’ Anger 133

The answer is no. Reading is an active task. It requires active for-

mation of events and information in readers’ imaginations. Whenyou remember a TV show, you remember what was on the screen.When you remember a story you read, you remember the way youimagined it. This is why reading to children is such a good prepa-ration for their learning to read. It gets the active imaginationprocess hooked up to books. So the first thing parents can do to help their children learn tostick with tasks and guide their own attention long enough to fin-ish them is to limit their TV and other passive entertainment. Evenso-called “educational TV” is not helpful if it doesn’t require thechild to do anything. The second thing parents can do is equally important; that is,learn to repeat directions to children calmly and wait for the child’sresponse. As parents, we all have a tendency to be in a hurry at least some ofthe time. Young children often take more time to process informationbefore they respond to it than adults take. Even six- and seven-year-olds may not look as if they heard their parents or their teachers atfirst. If you just wait, they will often go into action and respond. Often, when the child does not respond immediately, parentsand teachers become frustrated and angry. The effect of this angeris to raise the fear level of the child. This brings into play anotherimportant aspect of our attention processes.

Fear and stress make it difficult to keep attention focused.

Fear and stress cause hypervigilance, the monitoring of all sur-

roundings for potential dangers. Fearful people, including children, expand their attention. Webecome more vigilant when danger might be near. Like a nation onhigh alert, we use more of our energy than usual to look around forpotential dangers.134 The Anger Habit in Parenting

This means that when parents or teachers raise their voices in

order to hurry a response to a question or problem or order, chil-dren are likely to become even less able to keep their attentionunder their own control. Because they become more vigilant ofwhat is going on around them, they are more likely to be dis-tracted by other children or noises outside. Everything and every-one around them becomes a potential source of danger.Distraction makes concentrating on complying with a request orgiving an answer or working out a solution to a problem more dif-ficult for children. An even louder and more angry order fromtheir parents is likely to follow, which sometimes freezes anyresponse children might have been able to give.

Exercise 8-B: Developing a Patient Attitude

with Children

What is the most complex machine or industrial process you can

think of? A refinery that takes in crude oil and puts out gasolineand other oil products is quite complex. Mainframe computers, anuclear submarine, even the total economy of a country are mind-boggling in their complexity. The United States, with close to 300million people—each person making spending, employment, andsaving decisions—seems to take forever to respond as a whole tochanging circumstances. A child’s nervous system dwarfs the U.S. economy in its com-plexity. It has more than ten times more elements (nerve cells) asthere are people in the U.S., and they are related in seemly hap-hazard ways. The economy takes months, sometimes years, torespond to inputs, such as tax cuts or price changes. Is it surprisingthat children might take a while to process a request that youmake? What do you suppose happens if even more stimuli flood Children’s Attention, TV, and Parents’ Anger 135

the child in the form of angry, hurry-up repetitions of the request?

You will increase your patience as well as your joy in parentingif you cultivate an appreciative attitude toward the marvelouslycomplex events that take place in child development and learn tohelp children by keeping their surroundings calm while they aretrying to respond to your requests. Try to remember two times that you were involved in some verydelicate or complex task and someone yelled at you or told you tohurry up. How did it affect your ability to finish the task? An example will help you see what is wanted.

Example: A Complex Task and the Interruption

I was trying to do our income tax and I only had a couple days toget it finished. I could hear my husband pacing around waiting forme to finish so that we could go out to dinner. Right in the middleof trying to understand some complex instructions on depreciationrules my husband marched in and said in an irritated voice, “Whenare you going to finish that? You’ve been working for hours.”What Happened to Your Task Performance? After I told him to calm down and wait, I went back to theinstructions. I tried to concentrate, but I started jumping all overthe instructions looking for a quick answer. I was bogged down fora half-hour before I could get back to slow, careful reading. Then Iworked through the problem.

For young children, answering a question or responding to a

request can be as delicate and complex as anything you might haverecorded in your examples. They need your help and encourage-ment, not your anger and haste. The problems that children experience in paying attention, fin-ishing tasks, and answering questions and requests promptly arenot helped by parents’ impatience or anger. In addition, their abil-ity to attend and concentrate on what they are doing is harmed byTV, especially if TV watching is a major part of their life. As withother suggestions for changes in parenting, it takes effort—andusually significant changes in parents’ lives—to reduce children’sTV time and acquire patience with them when they don’t respondimmediately. It requires finding and teaching activities to childrenthat involve their active participation. It involves substitutingpatient, repeated help instead of escalating impatient demandswhen requests are made of children who don’t respond quickly. These changes may require making time to spend with childrenthat you don’t feel you can afford. Everyone’s situation is differentand we can give you no realistic advice on what you, in your cir-cumstances, can afford to do. But in any case, it will help you tosee clear goals—active children, patient and persistent parents.Even small steps toward the goal will pay off.138 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Success Record for Chapter 8

Recording successes, even small ones, is an excellent way to make

changes that stick and are meaningful. Make room in your privatejournal to record five times that you were able to either calmlywait a child out or were able to substitute activities for TV watching. You might set up your record like this example.

Date: 1/1Success in Reducing Tommy’s TV or Patiently Waiting forHim to Do What I Ask. Tommy always used to watch TV after dinner. Last Monday Iturned the TV off and asked him to help me clean up the table andthe kitchen. He sat on the floor saying nothing. I waited about aminute and I said calmly, “We are going to clean up the table andthe kitchen.” He sat. I repeated. After about five minutes he got upand started toward the table. I showed him where to put things hecleared from the table and he was helpful. I told him I would teachhim to play a card game after we were done. We played “War” fora half-hour. We have been doing this all week. It feels different,especially when he says things like, “Did Daddy used to do this?” Chapter 9 Keeping the Imaginary Aspect of Relationships HelpfulSix-year-old Serena is afraid of ghosts. Her older brother Sean goesto some trouble to prepare a moment’s entertainment by arranging awhite sheet, a light, and a fan in the hall outside of Serena’s room. Hecalmly marches into her room and says, “I have a friend out here inthe hall I want you to meet.” Feeling proud and grown up because of Sean’s surprising invita-tion, Serena follows him into the hall. The unexpected shrillness ofher panicked screaming startles Sean. He instinctively rushes afterher and tries to hold her and calm her. He says repeatedly, “It’s notreal. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” As her screaming turns to crying,she keeps saying, “But I saw it. It’s out there.”140 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Sean loves his younger sister, but he also likes to play tricks on people. He sometimes assumes that because he loves Serena, whatever he does to her will be innocent and not harmful to her. Sometimes his assumption is wrong.

Just as marriages are partly imaginary (see another book in this

series—The Anger Habit in Relationships), family relationships arepartly imaginary. By “imaginary relationship,” I mean how one imagines the rela-tionship, not how one imagines the other person. Relationships aredefined by words like “love” or “hate.” Even the most depressedparents who can feel nothing except pain usually imagine that theylove their children. All stable family relationships are partly imaginary and partlyreal. This is inevitable for several reasons. We rely on each other tobe dependable and loving through periods when our top prioritieslie elsewhere. We rely on our imaginary picture of ourselves as lov-ing parents even when our feelings for our children are other thanloving. Our imaginary views of relationships can make our realrelationships more stable. They carry us through rough spots.

Being partly imaginary can help family relationships remain stable

because it’s reassuring to imagine that others love us even when they aren’t showing it, but too much reliance on one’s imaginary love and caring feelings can blind us to our abuse of a loved one.

Grave difficulties arise if we rely on the fact that we love our chil-dren to assure us that we could never do anything harmful tothem. Sean took it for granted that he would never hurt his sisterSerena because of his view of their relationship—he is a lovingolder brother who protects his younger sister. He would never doanything to hurt her. Taking this view for granted allows him to do Keeping the Imaginary Aspect of Relationships Helpful 141

something that traumatizes her without his thinking ahead of time

about its effect. Parents are sometimes incredulous about having harmed or hor-ribly frightened their children. “I didn’t mean to” is a heartfelt cry.Parents’ imaginary loving relationship can shield them from rec-ognizing the true fear and horror their children experience whenthey are threatened. “How could you think I would actually aban-don you? Don’t you know I love you?”

Exercise 9-A: Checking for

“Love-Excused” Abuse

An excellent way to check out whether our assumed loving rela-

tionship with our children is giving us permission to abuse the chil-dren is to pretend they are not our children but are merely someoneelse’s children of whom we are fond. Would we then do what we aredoing? Could we explain what we are doing to their parents? Recall three incidents when you have disciplined your children.Imagine your children belonged to a friend rather than beingmembers of your family. Would you have done the same thing?Would you have been comfortable explaining what you did totheir parents? You may want to use this example to get you going.

Example: Incident Patty, our fourteen-year-old daughter, was yelling at her motherwhen I walked into the house. I could hear the screaming out onthe sidewalk. Patty was swearing and calling her mother namesbecause she was grounded and couldn’t accept an invitation to afriend’s party. I was boiling. I just walked up to her and slapped her.142 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Imagine the Incident Happening with a Friend’s Child

Well, I certainly would have been upset. But I guess I also wouldhave felt some sorrow that my friend’s child was so immature andill-behaved. I would never hit someone else’s child. Oh, that is thepoint, isn’t it? If Patty were a friend’s child, my wife and I wouldhave been concerned. We would probably have sat Patty down andtold her she was way out of bounds. Maybe we would even havetalked to her about her temper and what was going on for her aftershe calmed down. I see. It’s as if, because Patty is our child and welove her, it’s okay to act badly toward her instead of taking thetrouble to do something constructive.

Another difficulty sometimes arises from our imaginary views of our

children. Because our children are in our thoughts and we experiencewarm and loving feelings toward them we are apt to think that weknow them, even when we don’t. Our imaginary relationship withthem gives us an illusory sense of being in touch with who they are.144 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Our relationships need frequent refreshment that comes with

real interactions. The more remote we are from actual interac-tion with our children, the more danger there is that we willharm them. Extensive talking or thinking about a young daugh-ter—what she is like, why she does what she does, and whatkind of person she will be when she is older—all done withoutinteraction with her, are apt to lead you to decisions that arebased on a primitive abstraction of her. The imaginary relationship, when it is maintained remotely,can harm the real relationship, instead of helping it. Instead ofyour imagined love and caring toward a child helping you throughstormy real interactions, the imagined emotions replace much ofthe real relationship and poison your real interactions with a child.This is why caring institutions sometimes carry out misguidedactions in the name of children’s welfare. The institutional view ofa child, including a psychiatric diagnosis, is apt to be built up fromtalk among the professionals producing a caricature of the childthat just happens to fit an available special program.

Our imaginary relationships with our children do not contain

good information about our children’s real problems.

Our imaginary relationships carry information

about our attitudes and values.

Parents who are worried about their children’s behaviors often

build up a view of the children that is as remote from the realityof the child’s life as an institutional view would be. These parentsbuild a character in a sad play. The character is impersonal and dis-tant from the parents. A daughter becomes a series of clichés. Plansto intervene become more like plots in a bad movie. “She is irresponsible. She cares only for herself. She is a Keeping the Imaginary Aspect of Relationships Helpful 145

whore. She’s on her way to hell.” This is not reality and the judg-ments do not contain information about your daughter. Theycontain information about your changing attitude toward yourdaughter—information about how you are prepared to act towardyour daughter. Harsh and uncaring “interventions” are easily adoptedfor showing such a character “what’s what.” Anger and harsh treat-ment are natural when such characters are dealt with in B movies. Thinking remotely about your imaginary daughter is very dif-ferent from actually experiencing your relationship with her. Yourreal relationship allows you to talk with her, ask her questions, andobserve what she does. She remains real. She remains an individ-ual. She remains human. You are more apt to remain human also.

Exercise 9-B: Refreshing Your Imaginary

Relationships with a Dose of Reality

Many parents live separately from their children due to divorce or

long work hours that turn parents into visitors at home. The moreremote you are, the easier it is to allow your view of your childrento be determined by what others say.

The helpfulness of imaginary family relationships

to real relationships is due to the stability that they give through rough times.

There is no such stabilizing effect when your view

of your children—that is, your relationship with them in their absence—is negative and angry.

When just thinking about a child leads to anger, it is time to refresh

your view of the child with a good dose of real interaction—relaxed146 The Anger Habit in Parenting

play or casual conversation led by them.

Think of your children one by one. What is your view? Is therean angry component that sneaks in? If so, your imaginary rela-tionship with this child is apt to be harmful to your actual rela-tionship. If your real interactions with the child are mainly angry,something needs to be done about these interactions. In any case,try to build a loving view of the child. It cannot harm, and mostof the time, it will help you and the relationship. Here is an example.

Example: Success in Spending More Positive Time with Toby

Present View of Your Child When I think of Toby, most of the time I think of how irritat-ing he’s getting to be. He is fifteen and it seems as if he always hassomething smart to say. We are getting bad reports from schoolabout his behavior. He quit football. I don’t feel very good abouthim when I think about him.What Can You Do? I see the point that my negative thinking about Toby doesn’t doany good for him, and it just makes me feel bad. How can I changeit? Well, I guess I am being influenced by stuff I hear about ratherthan just what I observe when we are together. Maybe I will blockout some time together to do whatever we want to do. In themeantime I think I will try to build back the thoughts I used tohave of him, ones that made me smile.

Present View of Your Child:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________148 The Anger Habit in Parenting

The imaginary component of a family relationship is good for the

relationship and us if we nurture it, and keep it loving and caring.It becomes harmful if we use it for anything other than to carryover love and caring through rough times. One additional misuse of imaginary parenting is to assume thatit imparts competence. Having loving thoughts about our childrenonly tells us that our aim is to care for and protect them. It doesnot tell us how we can accomplish these aims.

A loving view toward our children does not give us

the competence to carry out caring and protective actions.

Thinking lovingly about a building does not give us the compe-

tence to maintain it. Loving thoughts about a painting do not giveus the competence to restore it. Having loving and caring on ourminds about a child does not give us the competence to rear thechild. So, given the dangers of imaginary components of relation-ships, what good are they? Rearing children involves much joy and delight. It also involvesreal labor, sacrifice, sometimes pain, and above all, perseverance. Amental picture of your child that evokes warmth, and perhaps a smile,is a fountainhead for what is required for the hard times. Keepingthat fountainhead unpolluted with anger, unclouded with worry, Keeping the Imaginary Aspect of Relationships Helpful 149

and sparkling with loving thoughts can help carry you through thedifficulties you may encounter on the long parenting journey.

Practice Record for Chapter 9

Leave three or four pages in your private journal to record your suc-cesses in making and keeping the way you think about your chil-dren loving and caring. You may wish to set up the record like the following.

Date: 2/14Success in Making My Mental Picture of Laurence a Loving One My wife was telling me about a call she got from Laurence’s jun-ior high principal. I was getting angrier by the second. Then I real-ized I had a picture of Laurence in my mind while this washappening. It was a picture of someone I didn’t like. In my mentalpicture, Laurence was defiant, unpleasant, and a real loser. I caughtmyself and said to myself, “Laurence isn’t here. There is no reasonto have a picture of him as a nasty child.” I then resorted to mymemory of him catching a fish last summer. It made me feel a lotbetter and I could listen to what my wife said more calmly. As it turned out, we spent the evening with Laurence, talkingabout his school behavior and what he could do about it. Hedecided to go and talk to the principal first thing in the morningand go on from there. Chapter 10 Cultivating Attitudes That Help You Parent without Anger “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” —William James, author/philosopher/psychologist

“The last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any

given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author/psychiatrist

Attitude is one of those things that we all know is important, but

it is difficult to define. We recognize a surly child as someone whoneeds an attitude adjustment. Our employers put a lot of stock in152 The Anger Habit in Parenting

their employees’ attitudes. As the previous quotes suggest, an

excellent way to change our parenting behavior is to change someof our attitudes. What are attitudes anyway? An attitude is the position you are in when you are approach-ing a situation. The attitude of an airplane is literally its physicalposition, for example, upside-down. The attitude of a person is areadiness to approach a situation in a certain way. The surly childapproaches adults ready to show them disrespect and even hostil-ity. Employees with a good attitude are ready to approach com-pany interests as if they were their own. The natural attitude of parents toward their children isunselfishness. Parental unselfishness is the exemplar of allunselfishness; a readiness to give up some aspect of one’s own well-being for the sake of another person’s well-being. But we do not bring just one attitude to all of parenting. Theseries of books on the anger habit, of which this book is part,could easily have been named The Adversarial Attitude; that is,another way of looking at the anger habit is as a readiness toapproach most problems in life as struggles with adversaries.Parents often bring an adversarial attitude to parenting problemsalong with an unselfish attitude. As we have seen in previouschapters, a readiness to make our children into adversaries whoresist our control can undermine any beneficial effect of anunselfish parental attitude.

It is a contradiction to treat an adversary unselfishly.

Caring and anger just do not mix well.

We have attempted to show how parents can develop alternatives

to the anger habit in parenting. Another way of viewing thesealternatives is: angry parents can benefit from some attitude adjust-ments. Cultivating Attitudes That Help You Parent without Anger 153

A way of looking at the alternatives to the anger habit is to cul-

tivate attitudes toward our children that help keep our homes calmand safe while fostering the well-being of our children. Some ofthese are:

• An enlightened, loving attitude—A readiness to help when

children’s welfare is in danger and a readiness to refuse children’s demands based on their self-important expectations. • An optimistic attitude—A readiness to persist in our expectations for our children’s behaviors. • A civil attitude—A readiness to believe in our children and a persistence in our expectations that their behaviors will change for the better, especially when no such evidence is apparent. • An enrichment attitude toward freedom—A readiness to provide learning experiences in order to expand freedom through expanded opportunities for children instead of providing license and support for them to do as they please.

Starting with a loving attitude, because they have an unselfish atti-

tude toward their children, many parents are uncomfortable indenying children’s requests and/or demands. They either complywith most of what their children want or when driven to the wall,they become angry. The adjustment required is to include theirrefusal of their children’s demands and unhealthy requests as partof the expression of love.

Because withholding feels like selfishness, parents tend only to

deny their children what they want when parents are angry and feel the denial as a righteous punishment.154 The Anger Habit in Parenting

An enlightened, loving attitude toward your children does not

require you to feel angry in order to refuse them what they wantor demand. An enlightened love is a readiness to care for children’swelfare, not necessarily to make them feel better. Parents who loveby taking care of their children’s feelings are apt to raise tyrants.Eventually these parents will turn on their self-important childrenand treat them as adversaries. They are tyrants in an importantsense. These children will run their parents’ lives to the pointwhere they must resist. The ensuing battle will drive out parents’loving attitude and leave guilt in its place. The alternative is to cultivate a loving attitude that includes say-ing “no.” It helps to see that one does not need to be angry inorder to say “no.” It really is part of a loving attitude to be readyto say no when the child’s welfare requires that they not do some-thing they want to do. Saying “no,” and continuing to say it in acalm, even loving, manner brings us to the second attitude listedabove, an optimistic attitude. Most parents are optimistic when their children give them rea-son to be. The adjustment required is to cultivate optimism whentheir children give them no reason.

Optimism is most helpful when it is least justified—

in the face of children’s failures.

Parental optimism leads them not to allow their children to trade

failure for punishment. This is a situation in which children learnto “take the medicine” of punishment in exchange for not havingto study or try to do better at what their parents wish. When chil-dren perform poorly or misbehave, an optimistic attitude helpsparents to hold their children to the task. “I expect you to do thisbetter, now try again.” An optimistic attitude prevents you fromsimply punishing or judging poor performance. An optimistic Cultivating Attitudes That Help You Parent without Anger 155

attitude keeps the focus on the work or task in question. It is a

readiness to return the work so that children learn to complete itproperly and learn that they can complete it properly. Parents with an optimistic attitude send their children a power-ful message: I can learn and accomplish even when I fail at first,even when I don’t see at first how I’m ever going to do it. It alsosends the even more important message: My parents expect me tobehave as they do, to be like them, an adult. Another attitude listed above is a civil attitude. It probablysounds odd to include civility as an important attitude to cultivatein yourself as a parent. After all, don’t you get along pretty well incivil society? Don’t you respect other people’s property and prettymuch mind your own business? And that is just the point.

Civility needs to come home.

Most of us treat other people’s (and many other living things’) indi-vidualities as inviolable. We could never justify to ourselves foolingaround with the distinctiveness and individuality of a friend. Wewouldn’t plant a tulip bulb and then try to change the color of itsblossom with spray paint. It is what it is. People’s individualities areholy, not to be messed with. Cultivation of civility toward children means that parents arenot only tolerant of the growth of individuality in their children,but that they view their children’s individualities as achievements. Optimistic and civil attitudes fit together well in parenting.Parents with an optimistic attitude toward their children are likegood farmers. They water, fertilize, and cultivate what they haveplanted long before they can see any growth that would justifytheir trouble and expense. Children take at least twenty years tomature. Parents with a civil attitude toward their children are likeexplorers. They wait expectantly to see what new creation nature156 The Anger Habit in Parenting

has produced. Like each mountain in a range, each child has his orher own majestic identity. Together, parental optimism and parental civility keep alive thewonder and promise of a new life that parents usually feel whentheir children are born. Together they insure that parents wouldno more attack their children than they would their newborns. Another parental attitude that is helpful in countering theanger habit is a mature attitude toward freedom. Many parentshave mixed feelings about the goodness of freedom and a lovingdesire to have their children do the right thing. These parentsoften end up trying to control their children’s free choices, whichis of course an impossibility. Children learn quickly that whentheir parents say, “It’s your choice,” it really means that they mustguess which choice their parents want them to choose. This is yetanother path to anger and adversarial relationships between chil-dren and parents. In our freedom culture—as opposed to obedience cultures suchas Fascism, Communism, and cultures governed by powerful reli-gions—we are prepared to embrace most manifestations of indi-vidual freedom. What does this do to parenting? Many people,including most teenagers, take it for granted that to be free meansto be free from any constraints. This is only a half-truth. If thatwere all freedom meant, an astronaut, cut loose from the ship,floating in space without even the action of gravity to apply con-straint, would be our ideal of freedom.

Freedom comes with increases in opportunity.

An adjusted attitude toward freedom is that it is opportunity.

What good is it to be free from constraint if you cannot do any-thing? Parents’ persistent expectation that their children attendschool, dress properly, behave in a nondestructive manner, and Cultivating Attitudes That Help You Parent without Anger 157

learn as much as they can about everything they can does not vio-late their children’s freedom. Learning gives freedom by providingopportunity. Getting along with others gives freedom as well.

Freedom requires hard work.

Perhaps one of the most freedom-giving lessons that children can

learn is that skills require practice. Whether it is learning to read orlearning to play a musical instrument or learning algebra, time andeffort must be given with little immediate reward except the prom-ise of increased opportunity. A parental attitude that consists of thereadiness to persistently expect children to expand their freedomby learning the value of practicing skills does not conflict with anyother aspect of parenting. This attitude will also naturally lead parents to monitor theeffectiveness of teaching. Allowing children to be exposed to longperiods of teaching that have no effect on children’s skills is thelast thing the parent who has an enrichment attitude toward free-dom will tolerate. Children need to learn to escape from dull prac-tice through mastering the material, not through going out theschool door. Teachers who teach, situations that enrich, and mate-rials that lead the child to master subject matters or skills are pre-cious because they provide many open doors for children. Cultivating optimism, civility, freedom through enrichment,and enlightened loving that puts well-being ahead of feelings isyour opportunity to learn skills that help you parent without anger.As with any skill, practice is required. It is hoped that the materialscontained in the lessons in this book will be a helpful aid to yourattempts to improve the most important thing you will ever do—rear your children in a calm, happy, and nurturing home.158 The Anger Habit in Parenting

Records of Successful Changes

Many exercises appear in the book along with suggestions for

keeping a record of successful changes. You may not have takenthese very seriously. Real honest-to-goodness change requiresdoing something, not just reading about it. You need not start withthe idea of doing every exercise and keeping every record sug-gested. Try one or two and then try pecking away at others.

Success Records for Chapter 10

For this lesson, handling an incident in a more productive way

because of looking at it differently indicates success in attitudeadjustment. For purposes of keeping a record of your successes,you might write four headings in your private notebook, leavingspace for recording comments after each heading. Note that a short description of what might constitute a success isattached to each attitude below. 1. An Enlightened Loving Attitude: Successes in Loving by Taking Care of My Children’s Well-Being Ahead of Their Feelings—stayed in good humor while merely saying no and repeating no when necessary. 2. Optimistic Attitude: Successes in Becoming More Optimistic and Persistent—it felt good just to repeat a rule until children complied. 3. Civil Attitude: Successes in Becoming More Civil and Respectful of Individuality—felt comfortable with children’s interests and was able to talk with them about what they like without trying to teach. Listened and asked questions without attempting to guide the conversation. Cultivating Attitudes That Help You Parent without Anger 159

4. An Enrichment Attitude toward Freedom: Successes

in Becoming More Persistent in Enriching My Child’s Freedom—felt happy and comfortable while persisting in my expectation that the children complete an educational task. Index

Mmoral community 78-82 About the AuthorCarl Semmelroth, PhD, has been in full-time private practice as apsychologist for over thirty years. He received his doctorate in psy-chology from the University of Michigan in 1969. After spending ayear as a National Research Council Associate in Washington, D.C.,he joined the psychology faculty at Cleveland State University. Hereceived tenure in 1972 and remained Associate Professor ofPsychology at CSU until 1975. Dr. Semmelroth and his wife, Sara Semmelroth, MSW, ACSW,then moved to Michigan and formed a private mental healthpractice. Over the years he has also taught graduate classes in the-ories of psychotherapy, developmental psychology, and lifelongdevelopment for the University of Michigan and WesternMichigan University. Dr. Semmelroth has worked extensively with clients experienc-ing depression, anxiety, panic, and marital and post-traumaticproblems. He has also worked extensively with young people hos-pitalized with serious psychoses. His journal publications have been in the areas of perception,language development, mental health worker supervision, univer-sity teaching, and classroom management. For more information, go to www.TheAngerHabit.com.